I always appreciate a good reference to William Butler Yeats “The Second Coming.” Last night on Heroes Mohinder quoted the entire thing. Some days it seems more appropriate than others:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center 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?
I missed the episode.
I always liked the use of this poem in the final episodes of The Sopranos. Reading it is the catalyst for AJ deep depression, but more profoundly alludes to the crescendo of the Soprano-Lupertazzi War.
I’ve always loved that poem. The plot of the was pretty lousy, but I dig Hiro so much that I halfway don’t care.
Oh, and listening to Mohinder recite that made me want aspirin. His delivery is so melodramatic.
I always figured that Mohinder’s power was The Power of Narration.
If so, then his secondary power is “cautionary example of poor judgment” better know as “don’t do what I do.”
My favorite Yeats!
I mostly get my poetry from comic books — though I can’t remember if I got this from “V for Vendetta” or “The Stand.” I do know that I got Shelley’s “Ozymandias” from “The Watchmen.”
‘The Watchmen’ now we’re talking.