Is Kevin Keegan’s return to Newcastle the second coming? We sent Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet William Butler Yeats to find out. Hover your mouse on the highlighted text for commentary on his match report.
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?
Read More: Kevin Keegan, Middlebrow Avant-Garde Poetry, Newcastle, The Occasional Match Summary
by Brian Phillips · January 19, 2008
The Simplest Game Community
Shamefully, I don’t think Yeats is middlebrow at all. But it is undeniable that this critical edition of it improves upon the un-annotated text beyond all imagination. Respect.
Roswitha, I don’t think Yeats is middlebrow, either, not at all—that tag’s just my general title for any post with verse lineation. In fact I feel toward anyone who calls Yeats middlebrow roughly as the decidedly middlebrow Dorothy Parker felt toward people who were hostile to Dickens:
Who call him spurious and shoddy
Shall do it o’er my lifeless body.
I heartily invite such birds
To come outside and say those words!
Glad you enjoyed the annotations. The whole thing lined up so well in a Dark Side of the Moon/Wizard of Oz sense that it almost made me believe in Yeats’s own prophetic opinion of himself.
I was more struck by the pairing of “Kevin Keegan” and “avant garde” in the tags. Must be a first, I thought. But a Google search for the two terms reveals 797 results.
Your Yeats idea might be contagious. These lines from “O Do Not Love Too Long” seem apposite for Keegan and Newcastle:
O do not love too long,
Or you will grow out of fashion
Like an old song.
Lance, that’s brilliant, and I think the idea could even extend beyond Kevin Keegan. “Long-Legged Fly” could clearly support a new stanza or two about Arsène Wenger.
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.
Especially after his kids get tonked by Tottenham.
Allow us an hour or two of gloating, sir.
It has been some time.
What a match for Tottenham! And it’s been a long time since I saw Arsenal look so clueless. I even thought there was going to be a fight between Gallas and Bendtner at the end.
For tonight I think the poem would read:
Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon French curse words so terrible that you almost just couldn’t believe them
Wait — apparently Adebayor head-butted Bendtner? This did not appear in the broadcast I saw of the match. Tottenham fans will be sure to enjoy The Game’s coverage of the question “Are Arsenal the worst losers in sport?“
I’m hearing it was a manual shove sadly mischaracterized as a headbutt. (Not that such details are all _that_ important in the grand scheme of things, and I’m sorry to spoil any Zidane jokes anyone was thinking of making, but still.)
(On an unrelated note, this post was worth the price of admission for the mental imagery alone of Zombie Yeats heaved out of his grave to do commentary on Premier League matches. In cryptic verse laden with apocalyptic imagery. Dammit, now I want Zombie Yeats commentary with the next match I watch. Or maybe Zombie Seferis or Zombie Cavafy, considering what and where said match is likely to be.)
look, what’s so great about losing that anyone should have to be good at it?
um. sorry. *deep breaths*
so, Yeats, absolutely. Marvellous stuff, really. A delight. I remember “doing” this poem at A-level, and that after prolonged study my desk-mate remained utterly baffled (he was, irrelevently, a Plymouth Argyle fan) if only I’d have been able to tell him that it was about Kevin Keegan then all would have been well (he would have known that any effort to understand the nexus of mystery that is Keegan, K., is inherently doomed to failure).