In one section of my current work in progress, the main character is kept a captive audience as his English teacher recites lines from Yeats's poem " The Second Coming " as a means of both demonstrating the danger of literature and of change. The poem itself imagines the end of days, and I've always loved it for this: the description of destruction, its prophetic tone, and the parting images of the "rough beast" moving slowly towards its own birth. Those cycles of death and birth, the fading of one age into another, is something that has always interested me; and it's something I want to revisit in today's context--hoping and working towards the ebb of racism and the growth of anti-racism. "Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre" Yeats's theory of history--represented in the double gyre --in its most basic sense is that something has power, and then, as that power diminishes, a new power establishes itself and begins to grow until t...
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