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A famous poem by Yeats that depicts the chaos and violence of the modern world and the coming of a new age. The phrase "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" appears in the second stanza as a description of the state of the world.
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- A Prayer for My Daughter
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 ...
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;
Read 370 reviews from the world’s largest community for readers. "I am greatly relieved that the universe is finally explainable. I was beginning to think …
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Achebe uses this opening stanza of William Butler Yeatss poem The Second Coming, from which the title of the novel is taken, as an epigraph to the novel. In invoking these lines, Achebe hints at the chaos that arises when a system collapses. That the center cannot hold is an ironic reference to both the imminent collapse of the African tribal syste...
Yet Achebes allusion is not simply political, nor is it ironic on only one level. Yeatss poem is about the Second Coming, a return and revelation of sorts. In Things Fall Apart, this revelation refers to the advent of the Christian missionaries (and the alleged revelation of their teachings), further satirizing their supposed benevolence in convert...
The hyperbolic and even contradictory nature of the passages language suggests the inability of humankind to thwart this collapse. Mere anarchy is an oxymoron in a sense, since the definition of anarchy implies an undeniably potent level of radicalism. The abstraction in the language makes the poems ideas universal: by referring to [t]hings falling...
The Official video for Moby's Mere Anarchy taken from his album Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt which is out now: http://moby.la/ewbanhYo Director:...
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4 Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 5 The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere. 6 The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 7 The best lack all conviction, while the worst. 8 Are full of passionate intensity. 9 Surely some revelation is at hand; 10 Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 11 The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
