Irrrrrreland!

With any luck, this will post automatically right around the time I am looking at this:

I'm in Ireland for vacation, still trying to recover my sanity a little bit.  I sometimes feel like my life lurches from chaos to insanity to disaster.  Whenever I think of chaos, I think of a poem by William Butler Yeats.  I think it's appropriate to share it here, because (a) Yeats was Irish, and (b) it's National Poetry month.  Enjoy!

THE SECOND COMING

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?

- William Butler Yeats

If anyone can explain to me sufficiently what the last stanza of the poem is talking about, I would appreciate it.  I vacillate on whether I understand this poem or not, I just feel like the first stanza is an accurate description of chaos.  In the meantime, look forward to posts I have planned on gun control, sequester, and other issues of the day.  Also, brace yourselves - the Ireland Pictures are coming soon to a blog near you!