Learning

In the spirit of Mel's non-challenge-challenge, which reminded me that the Internet is good for more than just Facebook status updates, I have been trying to feed my brain more when online the last couple of days. "Feeding my brain" usually constitutes a poem or amazing article that caters to the English major still hiding in me.

Here's what I found today, via The Writer's Almanac, in which Garrison Keillor reads a classic poem every day. Apparently there's a Penguin book compiled by him called "Good Poems" which NEEDS to be on my already overstuffed bookshelf. I remember reading this in AP English with Mrs. Knutsen in high school, and it still never fails to give me the chills. What an awesome line, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Still rings true today.

The Second Coming

by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?