TOP SCRIBE 2026
VCE 2026 Season of Excellence
Our own very talented 2025 Alumni, Ana Mihalic Tynan, was selected for publication in the prestigious Top Scribe 2026 Anthology for her powerful poem, ‘Greatness Was Come (Again). Top Scribe is a selection of 25 of the best top-scoring creative responses written in Year 12 Literature. The work was celebrated at its launch at the Wheeler Centre in June by Australian author Elizabeth Tan.
Ana Mihalic Tynan
Greatness has Come (Again)In response to: W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming
Blank, but simmering and the voice encasing
The tune no longer carried the notes left
In the back of a bag, buried: beware.
The warnings forgone, those X’s clicked
The foundations crumbling eaten by a
Needling blind ignorance curled to a fist.
Thoughts are dripping, the stained now left lighter
Innocence, a necessary conviction.
Insatiable hunger for control
Spurred forward by frantic fearmongering
Votes have been cast and people’s voices heard
Violent chants wedged causing cracks, vehement.
Supported again a beast reborn: beware.
A nation divided
who feeds the flame
That fire ignited, are Y’all great (again)?
It will consume but we remain idle
As political pollution now seeps
And creeps but this cost is still too steep, their
Bleeding wounds faced with such stark apathy.
What abhorrent melody crawls towards
Our vulnerable fingers to compose
These returning winds of dissonant greatness?
Context statement
‘The Second Coming’ portrays a grotesque perversion of the Christian return of Christ as an inevitable loss of stability of the ‘centr[al]’modes of power and control. A sense of disorientation is elicited by the distortion of iambic pentameter within the first line by the diacopic ‘Turning and turning’, this trochaic phrase emphasising the chaotic motion of ‘the widening gyre’. I wrote ‘Greatness has Come (Again)’ to present my own ‘blood-dimmed tide’ at the re-election of Donald Trump, and to scrutinise ‘our’ responsibility in ‘compos[ing]’this ‘abhorrent melody’ rather than the inculpability of Yeats’s poem regarding the inexorable apocalypse. Utilising the internal rhymes of ‘political pollution now sEEps/And crEEps but this cost is still too stEEp’ (emphasis mine), which connects and emphasises a ‘too steep’ ‘cost’, I definitively state that the current trend towards nationalism, evoked from my reference to Trump’s sensationalist slogan ‘Make America great again’ is unacceptable. I tend towards sharp, plosive alliteration, the violent ‘b’ sound rampant in my first stanza to provide a more aggressive tone, strengthening ‘beware’, while also eliciting ‘violent chants wedged, causing cracks’, evincing America’s divided position. In contrast, Yeats employs the elongated ‘ou’ sound in ‘what rOUgh beast, its hOUr come rOUnd at last, / slOUches towards Bethlehem’ (emphasis mine) to slow the poem and mimic the theatrical, purposeful movement of this ‘beast’, ominous and assured in its arrival. My reimagination of Yeats’s lethargic movement to a rapid ‘ignit[ion]’ reflects the urgency my poem demands in retaliation to ‘stark apathy’ and ‘idle[ness]’.