The widening gyre of heavy-handed allusions to Yeats'south "The 2nd Coming."

yeats

An undated photo of Yeats by the Bain News Service.

A recent Russia Today headline suggests that Europe is "slouching towards anxiety and state of war." According to the title of Robert Bork's latest best seller, the United states of america is Slouching Towards Gomorrah. A new book past W. C. Harris, an English language professor, claims nosotros're Slouching Towards Gaytheism. A casual reader might wonder why the nations of the world accept such terrible posture; is it that the earth is slouching towards bedlam? Have things fallen autonomously?

The but thing not doing whatsoever slouching these days is the "rough beast" in W. B. Yeats's "The 2nd Coming," the 1919 poem from which the phrase originates: "And what crude beast, its hour come round at concluding, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

But Yeats's beast, it must be said, isn't deteriorating or dying in its slouching, every bit the many references to the phrase would accept you believe; rather, it slouches in steady, defended progress toward a goal. It's actually a terrifying sight: the verse form's narrator intuits that the beast is coming to wreak some untold havoc. (At least ane blog got this subtlety right in a headline about the 2012 ballot cycle: "Romney slouching toward GOP nomination.")

"The Second Coming" may well be the virtually thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth's famous "sound and fury" monologue is a distant 2nd.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats's lines for Things Autumn Autonomously in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others accept followed suit, in mediums ranging from CD-ROM games to heavy-metal albums to pornography. These references take created a feedback loop, leading ever more writers to draw from the poem for inspiration. But how many of them get information technology right?

Hither's "The 2nd Coming" in full:

Turning and turning in the widening curl
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things autumn autonomously; the centre cannot concur;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the earth,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are total of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The 2nd Coming! Inappreciably are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste product of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a homo,
A gaze blank and pitiless every bit the sun,
Is moving its irksome thighs, while all about information technology
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again just now I know
That xx centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at final,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The poem has never joined that panoply of standard high schoolhouse texts, such as "Do Not Go Gentle," "The Road Not Taken," and "The Raven"—nor is it quoted in Dead Poets Guild. (The closest information technology'southward e'er come is a nod on Lou Reed's 1978 Alive: Take No Prisoners: "The best lack all confidence," Reed says to a heckler, "while the worst are full of passionate intensity.") If a social scientist were to canvass all the writers and rock bands who've lifted its lines, not many would say they establish the lines while reading The Collected Yeats or a vintage back issue of The Dial.

Yeats began writing the poem in January 1919, in the wake of the First Earth State of war, the Russian Revolution, and political turmoil in his native Ireland. Merely the get-go stanza captures more simply political unrest and violence. Its anxiety concerns the social ills of modernity: the rupture of traditional family and societal structures; the loss of collective religious faith, and with it, the commonage sense of purpose; the feeling that the old rules no longer employ and in that location's naught to replace them. Information technology's the same class of despair we encounter in, say, Ivan Karamazov.

Of grade, twentieth-century history did plough more horrific afterward 1919, as the verse form forebodes. The narrator suggests something similar the Christian notion of a "second coming" is about to occur, only rather than earthly peace, it volition bring terror. As for the slouching animal, the best explanation is that information technology's not a particular political regime, or even fascism itself, but a broader historical force, comprising the technological, the ideological, and the political. A century later, we tin see the beast in the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, the regimes of Stalin and Mao, and all manner of systematized atrocity.

Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the first book to borrow a line from "The Second Coming," cleverly inverts the poem: here African civilisation is the 1 under threat, and the rough beast is the West. Achebe's Nigerian warrior faces exile from his village and pressure from Christian missionaries who threaten the tribal manner of life; he commits suicide.

Only the title essay in Didion'south Slouching Towards Bethlehem goes one improve: fifty-fifty its bones structure mirrors that of the poem. Didion stands in the same position as Yeats'due south narrator, describing a social disaster, feeling the middle first to give out. Didion reported the piece from San Francisco, "where the social hemorrhaging was showing up," "where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves 'hippies.' " She tells of the disoriented youth she met there, including a 5-year-old named Susan whose mother feeds her acid and peyote. She muses that the hippies are dealing with "club's atomization," for which their parents are responsible. "At some point between 1945 and 1967 we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing," she writes.

In the wake of Didion'due south success, publishers have come to realize they tin can use Yeats'due south lines to pretty much any volume that documents confusion and disarray. Thus Elyn Saks'due south 2008 memoir, The Center Cannot Concur: My Journey Through Madness, apropos her bout with schizophrenia. Though these four words from Yeats surely resonate with Saks's feelings, the "eye" in question here isn't the moral authority of the Western world, it's one person's sense of stability. The trend has held for fine art books (David Gulden's photography collection The Centre Cannot Concur), politics (The Heart Holds: Obama and His Enemies), alternate history (American Empire: The Center Cannot Concur), popular history (A Blood-Dimmed Tide: The Battle of the Bulge by the Men Who Fought It), reportage (A Blood-Dimmed Tide: Dispatches from the Middle East), organized religion (The 2nd Coming: A Pre-Mortem on Western Culture), international affairs (Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO'due south War on Libya and Africa), correct-fly moral hectoring (Slouching Toward Gomorrah), memoir (Slouching Toward Machismo), and fifty-fifty humor (Slouching Towards Kalamazoo; Woody Allen's Mere Anarchy). It seems that for every cogent allusion (Northrop Frye'due south Spiritus Mundi, anyone?) there are a dozen falcons that truly can't hear the falconer.

Connections to Yeat'due south original are fifty-fifty more tenuous when his lines crop upwards in comics, pulp novels, TV, and music. The phrase "widening scroll" alone has been an inexhaustible resource. In a 2009 Batman comic past that name, written past the film managing director Kevin Smith, the superhero'south girlfriend nicknames him "Deedee," in reference to their offset night together ("we striking double digits"). Their bliss is cut brusque when the villain, Onomatopoeia, cuts the woman's throat open, and Batman wets his pants. Mere anarchy indeed.

Widening Gyre is also the title of a 1973 novel by Robert Parker in which a detective has to retrieve an explicit sex tape of a senatorial candidate'southward wife. ("Only getting back the tape of the lady'south X-rated indiscretion," reads Parker's Web site, "is a nonstop express ride to trouble—trouble that is deep, wide and mortiferous.") And allow's not overlook the "Widening Whorl" episodes of Andromeda, Sons of Anarchy, and Ben 10: The Ultimate Alien; or the album Widening Ringlet by the Irish folk ring Altan; or the downloadable RPG, featuring "a secretive system of benevolent technologists who seek to prevent the dark monsters of humanity's past from overwhelming its bright and burgeoning future."

And then there's A Gaze Bare and Pitiless as the Dominicus, a 2013 album by the metal ring Whelm, and a box set of experimental Norwegian music, Twenty Centuries of Stony Sleep—not to exist confused with the piece of work of the nineties grunge ring Stony Sleep, who never released a self-titled album. Not to be outdone, the South African band Urban Pitter-patter recorded a song chosen "Slow Thighs," a far cry from Yeats lyrically: "Slow thighs walking on h2o / See with dark-brown eyes the fisherman's daughter / She's crying with dry eyes / The lamb for the slaughter." And in the historic period of self-publishing, the term "rough beast" has itself been built-in anew: from Seth Chambers'due south brusque-story collection What Crude Beasts ("Information technology was late dark when I came home to find a troglodyte in my shower," one story begins), to H. R. Knight's What Rough Beast (wherein Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini join forces to expose a spiritualist medium, "the most debauched human in London"), to Hunter Play a joke on's "Rough Animal Man Erotica" trilogy "Gay Monster" (worth the purchase price for Evil Pegasus Wants My Gay Ass alone).

It'due south tempting to say the feedback loop has gotten out of control—to sneer at minor rock stars and hack writers who've salvaged the poem for parts, yanking their titles from it without bothering to understand information technology. Achebe and Didion had paid it a kind of reverence, afterward all, and it's safe to say Kevin Smith has not.

Only why not celebrate the trend instead? Yeats'due south lines piece of work outside their context because the give-and-take pairings are brilliant in and of themselves. "Blank and pitiless every bit the sunday," "stony sleep," "vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle"—they're both jarring and sonorous. Even "slouching towards," probably the most overused phrase of them all, retains its ominousness after all this repetition. We'd expect the rough fauna to "plod," like a limping monster in a horror movie or the killer in No Country for Old Men (which itself, of course, takes its championship from some other of Yeats's lines, in "Sailing to Byzantium"). Just plodding is a conscious activity; slouching is not. Nosotros tin can't even tell whether the beast has a will of its own. The verb heightens the mystery and dread.

Even if no one reads poetry anymore, "The 2nd Coming" is proof that a perfect poem can nevertheless go viral in a distinctly predigital style: that it's become a role of the culture's water supply. Slouchy though they may be, the misapplications corporeality to a tribute.

Nick Tabor is a reporter living in New York.