I will not write much about the Yeats poem I present today. Unlike some others I’ve performed here, it’s quite well-known. Phrases in the poem like “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” “the ceremony of innocence,” “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” and “what rough beast…slouches towards Bethlehem to be born” have been quoted, reused, and brought out as touchstones and summaries alongside distressing events. Still, if you’d like to see the entire poem “The Second Coming”  as it appears on the page, here’s a link.

Where folks do explainers for this 1919 poem, it’s usually pointed out that the Irish poet William Butler Yeats studied mysticism and magic, and alongside this short poem, he wrote other texts explaining his esoteric theories of the rise and fall of epochs. This was more than colorful stuff for poetry for him, he believed it, and believed that the 20^th Century was some kind of end-times. Now that we’re a quarter of the way into the 21^st Century, we seem to be running a little late — but Yeats was writing of millennia, so being off a hundred years or so might be a rounding error. And as he starts off writing of the cycles, the widening gyres of history, his sonorous phrases of dread keep coming back to us.

Yeats as wizard. Here are some of Yeats magical weapons. Photos from “Yeats, The Tarot and the Golden Dawn by Kathleen Raine” which I found at this web page.

.

Even ignoring all the mystical back-story, this is a poem about the breaking of nations. Therefore,“The Second Coming”  fits with the theme of civic poetry, and I put this poem down on a short list of poems to consider combining with music for this April’s National Poetry Month, but we’re nearly half-way into the month before I could complete a version that I felt was presentable.*  Given its grand scope it called for some big music, and my orchestral scoring skills have atrophied from where they had developed earlier in this project. Another way to make a large noise is to perform it with a full rock band, and I have been trying to recover my skills in that kind of ensemble playing this Spring. But there was another obstacle: I found that, unlike other Yeats’ poems, this one isn’t easy to fall into singing. The blank verse here tends stentorian, and I’m not a big-voiced powerful singer. For one stubborn section of the poem, I felt I needed to break into chant rather than try to keep the lyrical lift of singing. This sort of thing is a consequence of a composer needing to rely on a limited singer to realize the work.

The raw tracks I recorded for today’s song were somewhat messy due to the number of instruments: three guitars, organ, piano, bass, and drums, It was quite the operation to mix them even to my “good enough” level. You can hear that musical performance of W. B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming”  with the audio player you should see below. What, has that rough beast not slouched onto your screen? It’s not the end of the world — some ways of reading this blog suppress showing the player gadget. Here’s an alternative, a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

.

*As I write this sentence, I take stock and consider that since this Project began 9 years ago, I’ve been composing and recording the more than 800 pieces presented here at a rapid pace. To create a single album’s worth of music in a month is considered a challenge — since 2006 there has been an “RPM challenge” to write and record an album of songs during the month of February. I’ve been doing something like that, nearly every month, for nearly 9 years!

Has that been good for the quality of the work? I don’t think the answer is a straightforward “Of course not.” While there are times when I wonder about some months-long work focused on a single composition, at my age I figure anything I want to explore or express needs to be a matter of getting down to it and getting it done as well as my current skills allow.