the allure of evil

EVIL DANCES

Preachers make evil

to be

morbid, dark, and dreary.

No one would ever

want

to do it.

Yet sages know

how the beautiful

are damned,

and evil dances

along lighted promenades

with a light step

and a scintillating smile

and whirls

and pleases

and embraces

and all with grace

and ah!

bright eyes!

1973/1980/2010

This poem was first published in Monsters in a Half-way House, 1981.

The last two lines are echoes of Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "God's Grandeur," which I include here:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.


And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Hopkins was a Jesuit Priest, so for him Christ was a palpable presence.  Although his poems are not generally dated, we know that he wrote most of them between 1865-1885 before the coming of the 20th century, in which evil became a palpable presence in many alluring forms.

For reasons of historical irony, whenever I think of this poem, I also think of "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats.  Hopkins's collected poetry was first published in 1918 (29 years after his death), and  "The Second Coming" was published in 1920 (after WW1) and shows prescience of the coming century.  Even though Hopkin's poem hints at Western culture's impact on life, what a contrast in tone and vision!  Below is Yeat's poem.

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?


Let's hope the 21st century is gentler on all of us than the 20th was.  Below are the works mentioned in this blog.