Secular

Choral score

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I had “The Second Coming” on my list of poems to set for over a decade. I was afraid to set it, since it is such a well-known poem, and also I had heard Joni Mitchell do a gripping version on her “Travelogue” album that was awesome and fully orchestrated. But when Jeremy and I were disucssing texts I had to throw this one in the mix because it’s such a great fit for men’s voices.

I love the images Yeats calls forth, whether they’re read as biblical, apocalyptic or war-inspired metaphor. I think the sci-fi nut in me kind of wants this beast to exist somewhere. I suppose it does, within this words of the poem and the notes of this piece. However you interpret this poem, one thing that is true across all meanings is a confronation of the profane with the sacred. A world falling apart. The loss of morality and responsibility. The poisoning of a Christian dogma. The coming of a beast.

I didn’t listen to Joni Mitchell’s version for years so that one day, if I did end up setting this poem, I wouldn’t be too strongly influenced. Now I can stop skipping that track.

- Timothy C. Takach

Text:

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, 1919