Darkly amused

[redbird]

[Background: there's a long-running campaign of posting poetry, ancient through contemporary, on the subways. I think it started on the London Underground.]

On the train home today, I was out of book, so I glanced up, and saw some very familiar poetry. Eight lines of Yeats: from "Turning and turning in the widening gyre" through "and the worst are full of passionate intensity."

I don't know if whoever chooses poems decided the Republican convention delegates could use that poem--or that the rest of us who are going to have to put up with the damned thing would be comforted, cheered, or otherwise aided by it--or if the timing is sheer coincidence, but it seems fitting somehow.

Comments

[minkboylove.livejournal.com]

[Background: there's a long-running campaign of posting poetry, ancient through contemporary, on the subways. I think it started on the London Underground.]

Yep. I think it did. Poems on the Underground - verses of Ted Hughes and Carol Anne Duffy placed at strap-hanging level so that you could think about something other than how bloody long it was going to take you to get to Charing Cross this morning. (I used to commute on the Northern Line, aptly nicknamed The Misery Line.) Poems, suicides, mice and looooong delays are my most enduring memories of the London Underground.

Scarily accurate poem though, The Second Coming, and one of my all time favourites.