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?
by William Butler Yeats
(1919)
‘Glasgow / Second Coming’ ; named after the city of its creation and the poem to which it owes its influence is the culmination of 5 years spent living and working in Glasgow as a photographer. The sequence, inspired by William Butler Yeats’ stanzas establishes a dialogue between the poems symbolic content and historical context with the artists observations of contemporary Glasgow that aim to reflect his own deeply lived spiritual events .The Artist invites you to look closely at the sequence of images and consider the words of W.B Yeats’ alongside them.