I WAS fortunate to have been taught poetry by a teacher who did not limit us to the safe and marked-out nursery slopes. An off-piste adventure introduced us to WB Yeats and The Second Coming in particular. I can recite most of the poem from memory. En passant, do today’s youngsters still memorise verse?
The Second Coming’s rich seam of quotable lines has been tirelessly mined, used and abused. Lou Reed once silenced a concert heckler with this riposte: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
One line that stuck in my mind for more than50 years seems particularly apt today: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Paradoxically, the early1960s, when I first learned that line, was a time of easy optimism. I don’t recall a sense that things were falling apart. The Vietnam War was intensifying and a president was assassinated in downtown Dallas, but those things didn’t significantly dent our confidence in our collective futures.
Virtually all of my year group was heading for university with our first grant cheques burning holes in our pockets. Political change was in the air. To paraphrase Disraeli, the government front bench resembled a range of spent volcanoes. Harold Wilson was prime minister in waiting, about to deliver the white heat of technology and an Open University. When Bob Dylan told us that the times were a’changin’, he didn’t mean for the worse. What was there to be pessimistic about?
In general, things panned out pretty well for most of us. Our lives were infinitely better than those of our parents. Many like me came from families that never owned their own homes. My parents were in their 40s before they enjoyed the “luxury” of an indoor toilet. Improvement, progress and ever-higher standards of living were givens.
The past is certainly a foreign country and things were, indeed, very different there. Since then, confidence in the future has steadily eroded. Who can blame today’s 15 and 16-year-olds if they identify more easily with Yeats’s bleak vision?
It is understandable that, writing in the immediate shadow of the First World War, Yeats feared the slouching “rough beast” and the darkness that was dropping again. But we too have “rough beasts” that increasingly divide us.
Vacuous sloganising about “Brexit meaning Brexit” and “Making America/Russia (choose your poison) Great Again” imply a circling of the wagons and a new isolationism. Pan – European disillusionment threatens an imperfect union that, nevertheless, has avoided major conflict for more than 70 years.
A toxic political and religious rough beast originating in the Middle East threatens us collectively and individually.
Everywhere, the centre that implies reasonableness and compromise, is struggling to hold. Increasingly those qualities, the cornerstones of civilised behaviour, are considered the preserve of the weak.
Perhaps Yeats was correct. We of the centre lack all conviction and have capitulated too easily to the passionate intensity of the Putins, Trumps and their cartoon versions, the Farages, Le Pens and Wilders.
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