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Yeats was a prophet--- (Original Post) Atticus Apr 2020 OP
When I was a sophomore in high school, my English teacher, John Sheehy Fortinbras Armstrong Apr 2020 #1
A terrible beauty is born Sanity Claws Apr 2020 #2
I kept think of those words when I traveled Ireland tavernier Apr 2020 #5
The full poem: kentuck Apr 2020 #3
...the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.' keithbvadu2 Apr 2020 #4

Fortinbras Armstrong

(4,473 posts)
1. When I was a sophomore in high school, my English teacher, John Sheehy
Wed Apr 22, 2020, 08:25 AM
Apr 2020

Read us this poem in his beautiful Irish accent on the first day. I can still hear him in my mind's ear.

Sanity Claws

(21,822 posts)
2. A terrible beauty is born
Wed Apr 22, 2020, 08:34 AM
Apr 2020

He saw what happened as a result of the British response to the Easter Rising of 1916.
I see a beauty being born of what has happened over the last few years but I don't think it will be terrible. The birth has been protracted but it will occur.

kentuck

(110,950 posts)
3. The full poem:
Wed Apr 22, 2020, 08:56 AM
Apr 2020

The Second Coming

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?

keithbvadu2

(36,369 posts)
4. ...the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.'
Wed Apr 22, 2020, 09:20 AM
Apr 2020

Charles Bukowski — 'The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.'

============================

Bertrand Russell once said that the problem in life is that stupid people are always more sure of themselves, but the brightest people are full of doubts. That would also explain why it’s not always the smartest or best-educated people who are successful.

A lot of the most important positions in our society are held by extremely incompetent people, the kinds of people who aren’t very good at anything except bossing other people around.

===========================

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

-Charles Darwin-

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