“what rough beast”, 33” x 33”, Acrylic on canvasThis is another painting, completed on 14th August, from the series I've been working on for some time now. It is based on imagery from one of my favourite poems:
“The Second Coming”, WB Yeats
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?
The text of the poem is from the Faber edition of poems selected by Seamus Heaney (2000).
I think that most people who read the poem get themselves in entangled in the imagery that could come straight out of The Book of Revelations of St John of the Cross or from a horror story by HP Lovecraft but they are missing the content. 'Shadows of the indignant birds...', surely, these are vultures or some sort of carrion eating bird, disgruntled because there is no death. For me, the poem is about signs and portents, awaiting a struggle that does not come because in the Christian canon it is expected that Jesus' return will be a glorious thing full of rapture and wonder and the fear of sinners but what could be more disappointing than some sort of rough beast that lacks delicacy and grace? A clumsy baby that needs it's mother's arms to hold it upright. How disappointing for the priests that they would have to change a nappy! And so... a quieter image recalling the 'Madonna and child' pictures of the Renaissance, an image that shows the darkness of the world around a mother and her baby.
