Welcome to The Poetry Exchange.
We have conversations with individuals about a poem that has been a friend to them. In exchange we make them a gift: a unique recording of their chosen poem, inspired by the conversation and their thoughts and feelings about the poem.
The Poetry Exchange takes place in a range of venues and settings, featuring public visitors and special guests.
In this inaugural episode of our podcast, you will hear Dominic talking about the poem that has been a friend to him: ’The Second Coming’ by W. B. Yeats.
‘It’s just stuck with me, in a good friend way…it’s got this negative vision but this beautiful frame that can’t seem to support that, which is I guess is why I go back to it.’
Dominic visited The Poetry Exchange at St Chad’s College Chapel, as part of Durham Book Festival in October 2015. We’re very grateful to Durham Book Festival, New Writing North and St Chad’s College for hosting The Poetry Exchange. Do visit them for further inspiration!
www.durhambookfestival.com
www.newwritingnorth.com
www.stchads.ac.uk
Dominic is in conversation with The Poetry Exchange team members Fiona Lesley Bennett and Michael Shaeffer.
'The Second Coming' is read by Michael Shaeffer
*****
The Second Coming by W. B. 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;
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?
Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)
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