poetry 101

I don't think we ever read this in Gage Park.  One nice thing about college, though I didn't think so at the time, is that there were courses you had to take, and therefore you learned stuff you never would have learned on your own.  Coming out of high school I had a dim view of poetry, but I had to take English courses and that meant poetry, and I had to read and even memorize some and I got to like some.

But the poem is around, there are pieces of it in popular culture.  Actually I read a science fiction story titled What Rough Beast before I ever went to college, and then was surprised when I came across the actual poem.  The phrase The best  lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity is quoted all the time.

As it was explained to me almost sixty years ago (whenever I remember school days it is a lovely spring day on the other side of the dusty fly-specked window and the smell of chalk dust is heavy in the air) Yeats had a wife who had visions and he wrote them down as she spoke, and one of her visions was that every two thousand years some cataclysmic event which changes the course of humanity occurs, thus approximately two thousand years after the birth of our savior the world was stumbling into WW I, so yes Beagles, you do have it right.

My problem with those Zoroastrian and Deist, and hell, almost all religions that contain one all-powerful god, is that if He has something He wants done, why doesn't He do it Himself?  He is God after all, isn't He?

Good will always win is what The Liberal Agenda believed.  The shining sword of reason cannot fail to bring about the good life.  Folks conquered by the sword of might (where are all these damn swords coming from?) can forge their own swords and.free themselves, but those shone the clear bright light of reason will never return to their old bad ways.

We are still fighting the good fight, but it is by no means certain that we will win as it once was. 

You know these pithy little sentences which you come across all over and especially in the banner bedecked halls of fb can easily be rebuked by two words:  Sez who?  .