![]() (Perhaps Macbeth’s famous “sound and fury” monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats’s lines for Things Fall Apart in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, in mediums ranging from CD-ROM games to heavy-metal albums to pornography. “The Second Coming” may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (At least one blog got this subtlety right in a headline about the 2012 election cycle: “Romney slouching toward GOP nomination.”) It’s actually a terrifying sight: the poem’s narrator intuits that the beast is coming to wreak some untold havoc. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” the 1919 poem from which the phrase originates: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”īut Yeats’s beast, it must be said, isn’t deteriorating or dying in its slouching, as the many references to the phrase would have you believe rather, it slouches in steady, dedicated progress toward a goal. ![]() ![]() The only thing not doing any slouching these days is the “rough beast” in W. A casual reader might wonder why the nations of the world have such terrible posture is it that the earth is slouching towards bedlam? Have things fallen apart? Harris, an English professor, claims we’re Slouching Towards Gaytheism. An undated photo of Yeats by the Bain News Service.Ī recent Russia Today headline suggests that Europe is “slouching towards anxiety and war.” According to the title of Robert Bork’s latest best seller, the United States is Slouching Towards Gomorrah.
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