I’ve been thinking about the connection between literature, politics, and leadership because I gave a talk, “When Things Fall Apart: Leadership in Desperate Times,” in James M. Van Wyck’s terrific Fordham Literature and Leadership course this week.
W.B. Yeats’s 1919 poem “The Second Coming” (whole poem below), which captures the chaos of a post World War I Europe, has been referenced endlessly in the Trump era—particularly the lines, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” and variations on “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” The link between Trump and the Yeats poem takes on a more bizarre tenor when we consider that Frank Amedia, Trump’s “liaison for Christian policy,” has claimed Trump’s here to make way for the Second Coming.
If Yeats’s poem laments a lack of passion and motivation on the part of the “best,” (“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”) I counter with the post-Parkland Never Again movement that sprung up after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. I’m thinking in particular of Emma Gonzalez’s moving speech at March For Our Lives in Washington, D.C.–moments of which have been compared to one of the most iconic films in history, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc (Joan of Arc being another teenage leader extraordinaire, let’s not forget).
Yeats’s “rough beast” has often been identified as an antichrist figure. While this rings true on some level, I don’t read this beast as a solely negative image. Given Yeats’s cyclical understanding of history as interlocking gyres (or spirals), this is an end of times poem but also a birth/rebirth work (the birth of a new gyre or dimension, at any rate). Rough though this beast may be, it also brings some sort of “revelation.” This “shape with lion body and the head of a man” is also a Sphinx, the monster who in the Oedipus Myth held the answer to human existence. So, to me, this “rough beast” can also be the ways we put the pieces of our ruined society back together into new forms.
When I visited the Literature and Leadership course, I admired how Van Wyck bypassed tales of knights in shining armor. Instead, he taught his class that the fate of the world actually depends on truly shining things, such as empathy and unlikely leaders. With all this in mind, Yeats’ rough beast seems to encompass both the ugly outcomes of desperate times but also the visionary leaders that must spring forth from this ugliness. Ultimately, the “rough beast” includes ragtag and remarkable assemblages like the Never Again movement, which emerged four days after the mass shooting at Parkland—a rough, ingenious creature birthed out of “the blood-dimmed tide.”
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?