Writing about Didion for CNN and revisiting 'The Second Coming'

I spent yesterday writing a piece about the Joan Didion auction, and immersing myself once again in her seminal 1968 essay collection Slouching Toward Bethlehem, I couldn't help but think over the lines of verse from Yeats that inspired the title:

...what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

So I re-read the poem ("The Second Coming") and now it's all my head can conjure.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Read the poem here courtesy of The Poetry Foundation.

-30-

(P.S. I sought it out first in the 1944 anthology of British and American verse that I cadged from my father decades ago but it wasn't there; what was there, once again: "Dulce et decorum est": 'the ecstasy of fumbling' and the bitter descriptions of how war distorts the very flesh of the men forced to wage it)