The Second Coming WB Yeats

Poem :

The Second Coming  Launch Audio in a New Window
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
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? 


Meaning :

The Second Coming  is a Christian concept regarding the future return of Jesus Christ after his "first coming" and ascension to heaven about two thousand years ago.


Theme : 


Yeats believed that human history could be marked in twenty-century intervals. As the birth of Christ ended the reign of Greco-Roman culture, Yeats prophesies in the poem the end of Christianity’s dominance over human philosophy and the Western social order in the twentieth century. Clearly, then, he uses the second-coming motif as a reference to a new incarnation other than Christ’s that will displace Christian civilization with something less beneficent and conducive to human progress.

Summery : 

Yeats describes a falcon flying too far away from its master. The poem shifts into anarchy in the world where innocence is drowned. Around line nine there is another shift to the apocalypse. Rather the second coming of Christ, a sphinx is seen in the desert heralding not the saving grace of Christ but a vision of "darkness". Much of this poem has to do with the horrors of WW1. THe war to end all wars is in fact the apocalypse and the second coming is humanity's just reward. The second coming is not Christ, but darkness that man has plunged himself into.
Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”

Form

“The Second Coming” is written in a very rough iambic pentameter, but the meter is so loose, and the exceptions so frequent, that it actually seems closer to free verse with frequent heavy stresses. The rhymes are likewise haphazard; apart from the two couplets with which the poem opens, there are only coincidental rhymes in the poem, such as “man” and “sun.”

Commentary

Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, “The Second Coming” is one of Yeats’s most famous and most anthologized poems; it is also one of the most thematically obscure and difficult to understand. (It is safe to say that very few people who love this poem could paraphrase its meaning to satisfaction.) Structurally, the poem is quite simple—the first stanza describes the conditions present in the world (things falling apart, anarchy, etc.), and the second surmises from those conditions that a monstrous Second Coming is about to take place, not of the Jesus we first knew, but of a new messiah, a “rough beast,” the slouching sphinx rousing itself in the desert and lumbering toward Bethlehem. This brief exposition, though intriguingly blasphemous, is not terribly complicated; but the question of what it should signify to a reader is another story entirely.

Yeats spent years crafting an elaborate, mystical theory of the universe that he described in his book A Vision. This theory issued in part from Yeats’s lifelong fascination with the occult and mystical, and in part from the sense of responsibility Yeats felt to order his experience within a structured belief system. The system is extremely complicated and not of any lasting importance—except for the effect that it had on his poetry, which is of extraordinary lasting importance. The theory of history Yeats articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram made of two conical spirals, one inside the other, so that the widest part of one of the spirals rings around the narrowest part of the other spiral, and vice versa. Yeats believed that this image (he called the spirals “gyres”) captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process, and he divided each gyre into specific regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual’s development).

“The Second Coming” was intended by Yeats to describe the current historical moment (the poem appeared in 1921) in terms of these gyres. Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre. In his definitive edition of Yeats’s poems, Richard J. Finneran quotes Yeats’s own notes:



Analysis :

William Butler Yeats wrote his visionary poem, The Second Coming, in January 1919 when he was 44 years old. Already established as a poet, theatre director, politician and esoteric philosopher, this poem further enhanced his reputation as a leading cultural figure of the time.

In a 1936 letter to a friend, Yeats said that the poem was 'written some 16 or 17 years ago and foretold what is happening', that is, Yeats poetically predicted the rise of a rough beast that manifested as chaos and upheaval in the form of Nazism and Fascism, bringing Europe to its knees.

Yeats had lived through tough times - World War 1 had seen unprecedented slaughter; several Irish Nationalists had been executed in the struggle for freedom; the Russian revolution had caused upheaval - and The Second Coming seemed to tap into the zeitgeist.

'My horror at the cruelty of governments grows greater' he told a friend. His poem seems to suggest that world affairs and spirituality undergo transformation from time to time. Humankind has to experience darkness before the light can stream in again through the cracks.

Things might fall apart, systems collapse and spiritual refreshment can only be achieved through the second coming: a Christian concept involving the return of Jesus Christ on Earth. Except that this second coming would be no holy birth of an infant Christ in a lowly manger.

Something far sinister is in prospect; an antithetical creature, sphinx-like in nature, a rough beast, slouching its way, about to be born en route to a symbolic Bethlehem.


The Second Coming is a disturbing poem with memorable lines that have been used by modern writers, rock bands and others as titles for their work. It's a highly visual two stanza creation, ending in a long, deep question.




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