The Second Coming

I was watching Season 5 of the Sopranos. The psychiatrist and Tony were talking about Tony's bouts of sudden rage and frustration, his feelings that things were falling apart, the sense of an impending doom/breakdown utterly beyond his control.

In a quintessential Sopranos moment, the psychiatrist quotes Yeats's The Second Coming and Tony asks her what the fuck she's talking about. We the viewers sit all-seeing on sofas, smiling knowingly, admiring the aptness of her reference, the expectedness of Tony's reaction, and the way the two characters feed off and stimulate each other.

The next day the reference still echoes. The Second Coming is a poem to read in the morning, when the mind is young enough to absorb all that beauty.

The Second Coming

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?