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?
It’s apposite to our present age – though previous, and probably future generations thought the same. Surely Britain and Ireland, and more so, America are currently in a political and cultural turmoil, where those who screamed loudest for a return of ‘control’ have demonstrated their inability to exercise even self-control: the falcon cannot hear the falconer; the falconer has an agenda of his own, which bears little relationship to the needs of the masses.
No government has a concrete agenda to control global warming and no means to enforce one, were they to turn their minds to it.
What is the nature of that ‘rough beast’ slouching to Bethlehem to be born?
Who knows? But cataclysm is at hand.