Yesterday, I ran across a parody I wrote last spring, a take-off of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" called "The Swan Song of N. Leroy Gingrich." Perhaps I was premature. Anyhow, it moved me to now demolish W. B. Yeats and his great poem:
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning like a widening tire This Gingrich cannot tell the truth of it; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Newt’s anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The bloviated tide is loosed, and everywhere The celebrity adulterer comes around; The best lack all belief in him, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some reversal is at hand;
Surely the second coming is at hand.
The second coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of the 1990s
Troubles my sight: a wasted, contracted land;
A shape, a doughy body with the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless like his wife’s,
Is moving its low ideas, while all about it
Wind shadows of indignant Mitt Romney.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That thirteen years of pocketing deep
Were prelude to nightmare of a rocketing Newt,
And what rough campaign, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Tampa to be born?