Poems, Past, and Present

To begin with, I must confess that at the very beginning of this course, it was really hard for me to understand topics, more difficult was  creating connections between them,  but even harder was connecting those ideas with my current thoughts. Although, finally I saw the light, and I don’t know if my interpretation is correct, but make sense for me.  I found something similar between Ezra Pound’s poem “In a station of the metro” and William Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”, analyzing them from the point of view of context.

“The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.”

From one side, Pound describes a situation from the real world in which he was immersed, and that context or environment is not positive at all, he is alluding to unhappiness. Since he refers to people, as faces that suddenly appear, like ghosts, being just part of a huge group of people with no personal identities apparently. The most terrible idea is that he considers people beautiful, as petals are, but with no more future than falling down, as human race destiny would supposed to be.

On the other side, Yeats’ poem is also referred to a hopeless, troubled, and bitter world.  Using phrases as;

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre”; “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”; “The darkness drops again”,

In which he is alluding to his real world, and what he thought that the future was going to be. He thinks of a world monotonous, empty, that is waiting for something spectacular to happen.

What disturbed me more, from all that mentioned before is the fact that these poems were written many years ago, even before Second World War. And I’m not telling that they were a sort of premonition, which is not that impossible to think, but they were a mirror of their reality in those times, in those big cities, and the scene is not that distant of our current social context.

 I mean, Ezra was describing a typical morning or evening in Santiago’ subway, or even closer, I use Valparaiso’ subway every day, and the outlook is pretty similar; a lot of people moving from one side to another as if they were in a standby status. And same thing happens to me with Yeats’ poem, which is a perfect description of what is going on in different countries around the world; for instance, Ukraine, Syria, or even Chile sometimes, makes me think that we are into this negative gyre.

Does anybody agree with me? or Am I being just too depressive?