Areopagus Special: The Peoples' Proverbs

Seven short lessons every someday.

Welcome one and all to another slightly unorthodox instalment of the Areopagus. Though we often begin with broadly uplifting poetry, these past few days I've had something a little darker on my mind: The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats, written in 1919. Here is its first stanza:

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.

A famous poem and rightly so. Now, the reason I've been thinking about Yeats' prophetic verse is that his words could have been written at just about any point in human history. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. People say this of politics in the 21st century, and of society more generally. But Erasmus might have said the same thing in the 1520s, as Europe was riven by the Reformation, or Averr…