"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"

The Second Coming- William Butler 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 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: a waste of desert sand;

    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

    Wind 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?

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Confession- I haven't read or analysed this poem properly. I provide it merely for context. That makes it sound like I don't like the poem or that I don't feel like it deserves to be read or analysed. This is not the case. I just really wanted to make this post.

I had never read or heard of this poem before I heard the phrase "Things Fall Apart". I read Chinua Achebe's novel for a class in my second year of uni. I wrote an essay on the book and I learned that the book's title was from the poem, but I never read the poem. I realise that this makes me a sort of poor English student, but as we have established from practically all of my other posts this month, I have little confidence on this front so why beat myself any more?

Fast forward to third year and I took a class in criticism and theory (one of the hardest classes I have ever taken). One of the critics we read was Joan Didion. She wrote a collection of essays entitled 'Slouching towards Bethlehem' and in her foreword she included Yeats' poem. I found Didion strange to read at first. I didn't really understand her writing until the seminar and until I re-read certain essays. Then, writing about her and Virginia Woolf for an essay at the end of the semester, I started to feel a sense of kinship with her writing and the place/s from which she wrote.

I suddenly found myself being drawn to this line- "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold". I can't express in full how much this line has come to mean for me.

It makes me think of anxiety, hopelessness, despair, loss, longing, helplessness, loneliness, desperation, exhaustion and generally, my third year. I have developed a love for this line and it's strange because I have heard people talk about their favourite poems and their favourite lines and I have never understood that type of collecting and treasuring of art. But now, I feel like this line is a piece of art that I am adding to a library or catalogue in my brain of emotions and feelings that I need to remember.

Throughout this year I have always come back to this line and it has become a sort of mantra- in a weird and morbid sense. A mantra is something one says to encourage oneself or psych oneself up but I have been recalling this line whenever I have felt anxious and confused- which has been practically my default setting this year.

I would like to read this poem and figure it our properly in my head but as I have been thinking about that one line, I needed to write this post. Something tells me I will come back to this poem.

Until then,

T