Amid the disruptions of his own time, William Butler Yeats noted that “The best lack all conviction while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” That was a hundred years ago. Despite what you might call the prosaic diction, the lines have worn pretty well, and they’ve done so because they hit their mark with the speed and assuredness of a well-laced ball to a wide receiver on a slant route.
Almost nothing in “The Second Coming” fails of its effect: “rough beast,” “vexed to nightmare,” “blood-dimmed tide,” “slouching towards Bethlehem.” For good reason, it is a “thoroughly pillaged” poem, as one writer has sneeringly put it. We even have a New Yorker cartoon in which a physician, looking at his clipboard, says to his patient, “Your best cholesterol lacks all conviction, and your worst is full of passionate intensity.” That’s almost funny enough to get a smile from a humorless Jacobin in an ivory tower.
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