Comments on: ISIS, the rough beast

By: blert

blert — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 11:40:15 +0000

Barry: the anarchist president.

It sort of figures — since Ayers launched him into politics — chaos by other means.

By: Rachelle

Rachelle — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 04:09:34 +0000

It’s chilling, but ‘The Second Coming’ certainly catches my dismal sense of the times. But then I began to have that feeling the night Obama was first elected.

He has disappointed so many of his followers but he has not disappointed me – – too bad I expected nothing but ruin from him.

By: parker

parker — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 04:08:42 +0000

Does anyone here, with few exceptions, lack conviction? I think not, though I may doubt the ingrained conviction of some when it all comes down to dust. Family and longterm reliable friends are the basis of resistance. If you do not have that you are a member of only the lonely.

By: Ymarsakar

Ymarsakar — Mon, 11 Aug 2014 02:44:12 +0000

There’s no reason for America’s leadership class to have conviction. They aren’t the best after all. Did people think they were?

As for the foolish lot of mobs, they are merely tools. One doesn’t have high expectations of monkeys copying what they are told to do.

By: neo-neocon

neo-neocon — Sun, 10 Aug 2014 18:55:49 +0000

BuddaHat:

Yes, that poem evokes the same feeling in me. The Yeats poem even more so, though.

By: BuddaHat

BuddaHat — Sun, 10 Aug 2014 17:26:29 +0000

Robert Frost’s ONCE BY THE PACIFIC always evokes a similar shudder in me.

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.

By: Yancey Ward

Yancey Ward — Sun, 10 Aug 2014 16:23:16 +0000

The key line in that poem for me has always been the one about the best and the worst of people. When I look around me these days, I see more and more people full of passionate intensity.

By: Ymarsakar

Ymarsakar — Sun, 10 Aug 2014 15:08:50 +0000

William Blake’s Tyger is more fitting for these modern day characters.

By: Matt_SE

Matt_SE — Sun, 10 Aug 2014 15:07:17 +0000

Like Shakespeare, Yeats’ work has endured because it speaks to fundamental human nature. Thankfully, the sentiments expressed in this poem on recur periodically.
Perhaps that’s why they take on an eerie quality; there’s no banality of daily exposure, while remaining true.

By: Beverly

Beverly — Sun, 10 Aug 2014 08:22:24 +0000

My nephew, who just turned 30 (!!!), hadn’t read Yeats’s poetry. (They don’t teach DWM stuff in school any more, unless it’s Howard Freekin Zinn.)

S’anyway, when we were all at the beach, I copied it off the Net and wrote it out by hand and left it on his bed. He was floored: it got him in the solar plexus.

Just a little moment of light getting through the crack….