We returned to our places, these kingdoms
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation
With an alien people clutching their gods
Eliot, “The Journey of the Magi”
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.
Yeats, “The Second Coming”
It might be paradoxical and ironic to post-colonial thought, but it is very significant and not surprising that those lines of poetry from