Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

["RHONDA MCDONNELL" <rhonda_mcdonnell AT msn.com>]

I thought the Yeats poem referrenced early on in LITR might serve as a sort of beginning. I suppose all have read it, but it's worth a second look. Percy's vision of the polarized society and its failure to hold to a reasonable and moderate course, not to mention Yeats' "blood-dimmed tide" all have profound resonance for me these days.

The Second Coming -- W. B. 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 convictions, 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?