Poetry Analysis: Yeats’ “The Second Coming”

eatsThe poem “The Second Coming” was written in 1919 and is included in the collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer(1921). Harmon (1998) lists “The Second Coming” as one of the hundred most anthologized poems in the English language. It was first printed in The Dial (1920). Written after the First World War; it utilizes elements of Christianity like the apocalypse and the second coming to depict post-war Europe. Critics like Richard Ellman and Harold Bloom have proposed that the text pertains to the Russian Revolution of 1917.The poem is penned in rough iambic pentameter.

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: a waste of desert sand;

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

Wind 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?

The poem begins with the sign that the state of affairs has reached a juncture where the falcon cannot hear the falconer. The creature is completely guided by instinct now as he has left the voice of instruction, education or sophistication. The poet means to say that all biological creatures have reverted into the primitivism of instinct, they no longer pay heed to any guiding force. The falcon also symbolizes people who no longer regard the word of God. The phrase “turning and turning” signifies an inexorable movement, and the word ‘widening’ point to its all pervading-effect. The word ‘gyre’ was first utilized in Yeats’ book A Vision that is based on history and metaphysics. “The theory of history articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram composed of two conic helixes (“gyres”), one situated inside the other, so that the widest part of one cone occupies the same plane as the tip of the other cone, and vice versa. Yeats claimed that this image captured contrary motions inherent within the process of history, and he divided each gyre into different regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual’s development). Yeats believed that in 1921 the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic moment, as history reached the end of the outer gyre and began moving along the inner gyre. “ The move signified here marks the end of the world as the periods of history coincide. Yeats asserts that a revelation is at hand. Richard J. Finneran quotes Yeats’s words as he writes: the moving of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to its place of greatest contraction” represents the end of an age that always receives the revelation of the character of the next age.” Just as the falcon has divorced itself from the voice of instruction, the world strives towards heterogeneity as opposed to science, religion and democracy represented by the outer gyre. The best making its way towards Bethlehem is symbolic to this opposition to order and control. Things fall apart in the post-war world as there is lack of stability and security. The centre does not hold the world in communion, as there is lack of emotional and spiritual coherence. What remains is a sense of chaos verging on a dystopia.

The ‘blood-dimmed” tide is said to be set loose, as people are caught in a sway of current that is by blood and at once dims even blood(relations) in its sway. In such a situation, even the best lose all faith and the worst are ruled by an incorrigible passionate intensity.

In an early manuscript of the poem, Yeats had first used the phrase “the Second Birth,” but replaced the same with “Second Coming” while revising the same. The Second Coming of Christ that is mentioned in the Biblical Book of Revelation is here portrayed as an inexplicable dark force with an appalling and extraneous motive purpose as opposed to the true Christian faith. Yeast’s depiction is a total antithesis of the Coming of Christ, and can be adjudged appropriately as Anti-Christ. The ominous figure is said to rather precede the onset of the second coming of Christ. Yeats describes the image that he perceives in this poem in another instance:”Always at my left side just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast that I associate with laughing, ecstatic destruction. This beast is to said to have maintained twenty centuries of stony sleep as the Chrsitian civilization took its shape.” It holds the head of a man and the body of the lion. The beast holds a gaze as blank and pitiless as that of the sun, for, it just focuses on the action itself and not the reaction/result. The shadows of the desert birds add to the sinister atmosphere.

Spiritus Mundi stands for “a general store-house of images that have ceased to the property of may personality or spirit.” Images drawn from this ‘storehouse’ possess an absolute meaning of their own and “an operative force in determining meaning and predicting events in this world.” Yeats believed that this Spiritus Mundi sent out signs and indications that the poets/philosophers need to perceive. The ‘rocking cradle’ otherwise a symbol of innocence is an insignia of the appalling unseen here. The fiend mentioned above slowly but steadily makes itself to the birthplace of Christ, Bethlehem to be born there; that is, to fully manifest itself there.

Rukhaya M.K

A Literary Companion