10/05/2021
Movement 14 - Widening/Gyre
Screen printed colour fade
56x76cm
Limited edition of 5
Available now on my site (see bio)
This fade is named after one of my favourite pieces of W.B Yeats’ poetry, The Second Coming. The line it references uses the gyre as a metaphor for his belief in history’s repeating and cyclical nature. It’s widening an ever broader departure from its origin point. At least that’s my humble interpretation. All in all it’s actually quite a dark poem. What I hope these fades share with poetry the endless delight in the interpretation of what lies within.
The poem is public domain now and I’ve posted it below for your enjoyment:
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?
Ink
Paper