Starving Hysterical Naked

The first line of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" published in 1956: 

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked ...

Damned straight as we reach the end of 2024. Many of us baby boomers imagined that by now we'd be living (if we were still alive) in a technologically advanced, George Jetson-like world where the problems of hunger, poverty, war and discrimination would be greatly diminished, if not eradicated.

Ha. Not so much. The poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats, published in November 1920, seems eerily prescient. (Please note this poem is in the public domain.)

The Second Coming by William Butler 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?

Sadly I tend to be a glass half-empty type of person. But I've always found comfort in these words from the 14th century Catholic mystic Julian of Norwich. My guess is that many of you are familiar with them:

"All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well."

Not bad to end on that note.

*FYI: The Poetry Foundation is a great resource (poetryfoundation.org). If you'd like to read the rest of "Howl" and other great poems, you can easily find them there.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Plotting and Pantsing

The general consensus is that there are two types of fiction writers: plotters and pantsers.  Plotters plan out their stories, scene by scene, chapter by chapter before they start their manuscripts. They know exactly where they're going and how they plan to get there. Pantsers , as the name implies, fly by the seat of their pants. As much as I've tried to become more of a plotter, I find the technique difficult. Once I start a novel, I have a general sense of my main characters, theme and plot. Endings are no brainers for romantic suspense writers like me - the romance genre requires happy-ever-after resolutions, of which I've always been a fan. My characters often have minds of their own and take me in unanticipated directions. Today, as I penned my sixth chapter, the hero of my current novel (I'm branching off into sci-fi romance) revealed he has a drinking problem. I had no idea. My problem as a pantser is that I can dig myself into plot holes in terms of sequence a...
Read more

And Then I Exploded

  And Then I Exploded ( Response to a writing prompt. You look at the prompt, whatever it is, and take it from there. No idea what I'm going to write until I start.)   And then I exploded, because the addition of a pair of ferrets to the five dogs and eighteen cats living in my brother Phil’s two-bedroom bungalow had passed the edge of eccentricity and was fast approaching the bona fide insane. When I’d moved in with my widowed brother the previous year, our household consisted of two long-in-the-tooth humans, three assorted mutts – Ebenezer, a gentle Lab mix, the hyperactive beagle Claudia, and Susie, a moody miniature poodle – plus four cats, Christopher, Alphonso, Mimi, and James. “You’ll have your own room. Private. No animals allowed,” Phil promised me. Which worked for a time. Phil took in more cats, ceding them his bedroom and sleeping on the living room couch as the three pooches snored at his feet. He prided himself on keeping the bungalow immaculate, so cle...
Read more