﻿William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS was the star of the Irish Renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th century. I will dare to assume that he was a man that was not willing to assimilate his cultural identity into the dominant culture of his world and assume (or even proclaim), like many imperial Anglo-Saxons (and their obsequious admirers), that everything worth anything came from Imperial Rome. I further dare to say, that when one pays respects to Imperial Rome (consciously or by some unconsciousness form of inheritance), this one probably has no problem with war and physical/social/political domination by overwhelming force.

As of this writing, there are people that corporate media of my country call “hawks.” When Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1922, he uses the word falcon and the image of lions in the desert—like the deserts in war-torn Iraq being bombed by our hawks in their own second coming. We present this work here insisting that these words are timely and may have new meaning and renewed power placed in this context.

I am almost certain that many mechanical purists out there may ask, “What does Yeats have to do with the kinté space?” To these people I incoherently pose the question, Why should a middle class person of color be admitted to college when they have test scores lower than European applicants of the same economic class? Moreover, my given name, Bryan, is Celtic (I think it means “strong”). So I have always been a little curious about a people who threatened the ancient Roman Empire just like the African Carthaginians led by Hannibal—and we (meaning those Celts of Brittany—not of Gaul) have been under the eye of the hawks ever since.

For more information about Yeats, the Celts, the Irish, the Gauls and the Romans, get them all at once very quickly in Microsoft Encarta. Also, for a reminder of how my Celtic brethren treated African Americans in the great city of New York, look for the tragic tale in the Ric Burns documentary New York.


Written by . . . . . . . William Butler Yeats