108 PA RT O N E
Another brilliant bird turns emblem in Yeats’s apocalypse “The Second
Coming”:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.He never practiced the noble sport of falconry, but if it offers such recog-
nitions—
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity—so much the better. At any time, those words may apply.
Once, during the unrest provoked by Irish rebellion, Yeats composed a per-
fect poem, “The Stare ’s Nest by My Window,” balancing nature with history,
birds and bees with firsthand human experience. “In the west of Ireland,” he
notes, “we call a starling a stare, and during the civil war, one built a nest in a
hole in the masonry by my bedroom window.” This time his refrain rounds off
all four stanzas, moving from “honey-bees” through political mayhem toward
a cry for regeneration, “O honey-bees, / Come build.. .”
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother bird brings grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned.
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war:
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart ’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.Lines of terse idiom ending on a refrain, two rhymes per stanza with one of
them always on “stare,” telling detail (“loosening masonry,” “grubs and flies”)