The next line of the W.B. Yeats poem featured in the previous post The Widening Gyre goes like this:
“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”.
This tropical themed garden features tigerish striped bromeliads, some with sharp points and serrations and is altogether an explosion of chaotic shapes and colours in every direction; botanic flares and shrapnel, an anarchic sprawl.
No neat flowerbeds planted in rows – here there is the sense of the wild and uncontrolled world that Yeats was on about .
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold…”
– W.B.Yeats ,excerpt from ‘The Second Coming’
These often quoted lines of poetry are mesmerising and terrifying to me , and the whole work is said to be prophetical and allegorical.
I’ll leave the latter for the scholars of literature to debate.
But the words have spoken to me deeply and personally of a time when my centre could no longer hold.
Things fell apart.
I was a lost falcon without direction.
Forces were beyond my control.
Mesmerising.
Terrifying.
As shockingly vivid as the hues and shapes of this picture, but thankfully in the past.
All I can say, if you’re in the eye of a chaotic hurricane , is that ” this too, shall pass.”
Ebb Then Flood 