The Second Coming

going? Slouching Toward Bethlehem.

It's from The Second Coming, which is about, you know, the coming apocalypse.

Yeah, it's a dark response.

That poem, so many works have derived their titles or whatever from that.

It doesn't start.

with a guy in a mallet chipping at a piece of stone.

He imagines what that cross will look like.

He draws it up or she, and then that begins to take shape in terms of what that can actually look like.

He was very unusual in the sense that not systematic really.

And I'll tell you why, how we discovered that.

But he would think in his mind and draw it out, but he wouldn't work out all the details till he actually got on the stone.

And I learned later that that's not how all stonemasons work.

This is a deliberate stylistic choice that validates Igbo oral culture within the form of the Western novel.

And then there is the title itself, taken from W.B. Yeats's poem, The Second Coming, Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.

By borrowing from a canonical Western poem, Achebe is doing something very clever.

He's using the colonizer's literary tradition to tell the story of colonialism's destruction.

Hmm.

And then you get the big dog of his poems, his masterpiece, The Second Coming.

All

right.

The act of looking at it may change it.

Now, meanwhile, the Irish poet named William Butler Yeats, you probably heard Yeats before, right? in the same year of 1919, writes a poem called, quote, The Second Coming, close quote.

And it contains a line that has echoed ever since.

It says, quote, Things fall apart.