Sometimes it's eerie

One of my best friends posted yesterday her thoughts about the (potential) end of the war in Iraq and remembered her response to September 11th at the same time. What's eerie about that, is that my class spent most of our time yesterday discussing September 11th and the war. What's interesting about it, is the difference in responses and I'm not sure if I can sort out whether the differences occur because of the ages of the people responding to the event, or because of their nationality.

I got to school yesterday realizing I had no specific goals for the class for that day. They were to hand in the first draft of their first paper for the course, with me responding to that draft over the weekend (I of course still have to do that) and returning it with my comments so they can write a second draft and then turn in the final paper by the end of next week. I like to use the day that they hand in first drafts as a chance for the students to take a break from what they've been working on and discuss other literary or writing topics that don't necessarily directly relate to the project at hand. I usually begin such classes with a question period and last term, I had one class that loved these opportunities and could fill the entire time with relevant and interesting questions. I usually try to have a poem or short story up my sleeve to discuss if the question period doesn't progress along. This time I choose Yeats, since it was in our anthology, and it was, interestingly, included in a section titled "Understanding September 11, 2001" which included a series of poems that have circulated in response to the event. I presented it to the students from the website from which I took the reprint below, asked them what they thought about it, then we turned to the anthology and read the introduction that identifies Yeats time, place, and position as an Irishman resenting British control of his country. After they realized it was written post-WWI (at that time of course, only know as The Great War), they were better able to understand the nihilism in the poem, though they could not agree with it. I've reprinted the poem here:

The Second Coming
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?

(thanks to The Academy of American Poets for their reproduction of the poem)

One of the most surprising things for me was that only one of my students had ever heard this poem before, and none of them recognized any of the phrases that have been appropriated by other writers and filmmakers in their products. No wonder it's so extensively quoted - there are some absoluntely fabulous lyrics in this poem!

The other thing that surprised me was the fact that almost every one of my American college freshman students expressed (almost collectively), a response to 9-11 that focused on its unifying effects, or the need after the event for people to console one another and put the event in perspective. They were not able to understand this poem as a response to 9-11 but they were able to use it as an interpretation of the war in Iraq. While they could not necessarily agree, they assigned the role of the rough beast and the sphynx in the desert to America or Iraq alternately. I was also surprised that in the class, there was no one (or at least no one willing to talk) who could interpret the Christian imagery in the poem or who knew how the events of the apocalypse (a la Revelations) are supposed to unfold.

What interested me was the students inability to understand how this nihilistic or warning poem could be useful to people as a way on understanding these events. My friend Allie, who I started talking about, says (I hope she doesn't mind, but it's so relevant) "perhaps I recognize it a way of understanding how my own thoughts can differ from one day to the other, how my loyalties are torn, how demands are made on my opinions, how my age (now I am in my 30's) precludes me from being absloultey sure of right or wrong..... how I have an awareness now that what I think is right is not always right for someone else. How I realize my opinion or needs are not more important than someone elses.... how I know I am not perfect, or sometimes not even the best person I could be". Since she says very eloquently how I feel as well, the question is, do we both feel this way because we're so much older than my students? or because we're not Americans?

My instinct tells me that age plays the biggest role, but I don't discount that some of the difference may be patriotic.