Calder's Mobile
National Gallery of Art, East
Washington, DC

While I was back east, an article ran in the Washington Post about Chinua Achebe, whose novel "Things Fall Apart" was being honored by various luminaries on its 50th anniversary of publication. One invited guest, Colum McCann recited William Butler Yeats:
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. . . "

So, as usual, the quote lead me to look up the entire poem.

The Second Coming

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?

William Butler Yeats

McCann noted that "The best literature is connected. We are word-linked. Yeats, Achebe--their words unravel and remake us."

Calder's Mobile
National Gallery of Art, East
Washington, DC