“In every chaos, there is a cosmos. In every disorder, a secret order” ~ Carl Jung
Read on or listen to the audio to explore:
How an apocalyptic poem from 1919 speaks to now
The Jungian concept of the collective shadow
What poetry can teach about embracing the unknown
Image: From A Book of Images by W.T. Horton & W.B. Yeats (1898)
The poet who was a fisherman who was a magician.
No one is at the poet’s grave except for me, my husband and the murder of rooks filling the small churchyard with their excitable static. Part of the revolutionary movement for a free Ireland, William Butler Yeats died in the South of France but chose to be buried here in the foothills of Ben Bulben a stone’s throw from the Sligo coastline - haunt of the fishermen, living and dead, who wandered into so many of his poems.
Yeats was also a fisherman of sorts. Except his ocean was the creative unconscious and his catch the shimmering visions of beauty and horror, which he dangles before us on the end of line after line. Plying his barnacled trawler between worlds, Yeats was an active member of the secret magic society, The Golden Dawn, and regularly experimented with the occult practice of automatic writing – becoming both fisherman and fisherman’s rod.
It was through this metaphysical dredging of the depths that Yeats came to view history as a series of thousand-year cycles symbolised by two interpenetrating cones, which he called ‘gyres’. These gyres, which look like a page from a book of spells or sacred geometry, Yeats likened to the phases of the moon. As one gyre waxes, the other wanes, instigating a perpetual cycle of personal and historical endings and beginnings, death and re-birth.
Each time we pass through Sligo on our trips to the West coast of Ireland, we’ve been making a habit of stopping by the churchyard to be with Yeats’ feathery emissaries, or so I like to think, and tune into their frequencies. On this day in the churchyard, the rooks, in my imagination, are the shrieking vectors of the angry mobs setting fire to hotels sheltering asylum seekers across the British Isles; they’re the cold hyperbole of populist leaders around the globe promising to take back control; they’re the desperation and restlessness I’m noticing at large on the streets; they’re the frenzied hyper-individualism that’s driving us further and further into our own hermetically sealed silos even as these same silos also drive us further and further apart. And they’re the horror beyond words of the genocide, starvation, climate breakdown and mass extinction shattering our world we as know it.
In the midst of this unsettling crackle, I open the book of Yeats verse I’ve brought with me and read perhaps his most famous poem out loud to the rooks.
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 a nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
When the centre cannot hold.
Yeats wrote this poem, which he titled, ‘The Second Coming’, in 1919 immediately after the end of the First World War and hot on the heels of the start of the Irish War of Independence, following the ill-fated 1916 Easter Rising. Not only did ‘The Second Coming’ appear in Yeats’ metaphysical fishing net in a period marked by conflict and war but also the global pandemic that nearly killed his pregnant wife.
Since Yeats’ death (and arguably before) ‘The Second Coming’ has transcended its intentionally loose tethering to place and time to take on a life of its own in the collective psyche. I first came across it in the mid-nineties, indirectly, while reading the U.S. journalist Joan Didion who titled an essay collection about the death of the hippy dream and the birth of something much darker, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
A couple of decades earlier, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe had called his 1958 novel about African independence ‘Things Fall Apart’ - a line that later re-surfaced as the title of the 1999 album by American hip hop musicians, The Roots. Last Summer on our long drives along the West coasts of Ireland and Portugal, my husband and I listened to the excellent podcast about the evolution of the current culture wars by British journalist Jon Ronson called ‘Things Fell Apart’.
So, like the numinous cyclical image of the gyre in Yeats’ poem, ‘The Second Coming’ itself keeps coming back around as the ‘slow thighs’ of neo-colonialism merge with ecological devastation and the psychic degradation of end-times capitalism to catastrophic effect.
In the second half of 2025, Yeat’s nightmarish vision of the slouching beast materialising out of the desert feels a lot like the Jungian collective shadow. If the shadow is what we bury and disown, this hideous creature is what has been birthed through our collective denial about how so much of what we call progress has been built on the devastating legacies of violence, extraction and the myth of separation so we can continue to maintain the illusion that we’re not responsible for the mess we’re in.
At the poet-fisherman-magician’s grave, I put my book of verse down and turn my gaze back to rooks. What does this rough beast want? I ask them. What else is buried inside this vast, dense shadow? What can it teach us?
Why we need an initiation into the unknown.
Educator, global justice activist and artist Vanessa Machado de Oliveira explores the thorny question of how, exactly, we can face our collective delusions and denials about the apocalypse now in her 2021 book ‘Hospicing Modernity – Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism.’ In yet another twist on Yeats’ troubling poem, the last chapter is called ‘As Things Fall Apart’. Just as Jungian thought sees outer reality as a mirror to our inner psychodramas and vice versa, de Oliveira likewise suggests the crumbling structures of modernity - its hierarchies and institutions – is symptomatic of a collective inner crumbling of epic proportions in the form of the current global mental health crisis.
In the face of this mass crumbling via the birthing of this slouching, blank-eyed beast, we have a number of options. We can keep calm and carry on. We can double down in our efforts to save modernity as we know it. Or, as de Oliveira proposes, we can sit with the pain of witnessing this catastrophic inner and outer collapse in order to find out what we can learn from it.
“Before anything different can happen,’ she writes, "Before people… can imagine differently, there must be a clearing, a decluttering, an initiation into the unknowable… Facing the good, the bad, the beautiful, the broken and the messed up of humanity within and around us is the first step in preparing for when things fall apart.”
In many ways, Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’ is exactly that - an initiation into the unknowable. Yeats doesn’t trade in the answers, formulae, coherence, codes and fixed certainties modernity has taught us to demand and expect. Instead, his poem is written in the primordial language of metaphor and symbol and ends on a question. There’s no clear resolution in sight. Only the numinous image of the widening gyre, turning and turning, suggesting something, as yet, unimaginable.
It’s late afternoon as we leave and the sun has cast a long shadow across Yeats’ grave. I take one more backwards glance toward the rooks making shapes in the sky. I watch them become waves, then mountains, then rivers, then moons, dancing to a hidden cosmic order only they can see.
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