The Second Coming
About the poet:
William Butler Yeats (born June 13, 1865, Sandymount, Dublin, Ireland—died January 28, 1939, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France) was an Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
About the poem:
The Second Coming, poem by William Butler Yeats, first printed in The Dial (November 1920) and published in his collection of verse entitled Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). Yeats believed that history is cyclical, and “The Second Coming”—a two-stanza poem in blank verse—with its imagery of swirling chaos and terror, prophesies the cataclysmic end of an era. Critics associated the poem with various contemporary calamities, such as the Easter Rising of 1916, the Russian Revolution of 1917, the rise of fascism, and the political decay of eastern Europe.
The Second Coming was written in 1919 and was published two years after and
the initial title in the draft was The Second Birth and later he changed it to The
Second Coming. It refers to the coming of Christ, that is, Christ will return to the
earth as promised in the New Testament. There is an unconventional theme in the
poem which has alluded many readers because of its oblique references and
ambiguous images. Now, Yeats had lived through the tough times. He has written
many poems in the shadow of World War 1. If you have read Prayer for My
Daughter and then Easter 1916 and his many other poems are based on the same
theme of war or an Irish revelation. So here also he had seen unprecedented
slaughter. Several Irish nationalists had been executed in the struggle
for freedom. So let’s understand the poem first.
There are two stanzas and let’s take up the first stanza. The poet in these lines
describes a nightmare scene, the image of a falcon flying out of the hands of its
human master falconer. Falcon is a bird (hawk-like bird) and Falconer is the
master. The poet takes the image from the medieval times when people would
use Falcons or Hawks to track down animals at ground level. Now he says that
this Falcon has gone out of the hands of his master. It is out of control and now it
is not going to come back. So you can take this as the present situations which
had gone out of the hand of man because of the wars. Anarchy, chaos all was
there in abundance so much that the centre cannot hold things. It is so difficult to
hold the centre that it has gone out of control. The cyclone of death and disaster
is filed in the gyre. There is the spiral movement of the wind or the smoke which
carries away everything in its force and destroys it. This word is very famous with
Yeats. I mean it is his favourite word he had used it in Sailing to Byzantium also.
So the centre is going out of control to things that fall apart. The civilization is
breaking very fast. The devil evil has taken over the innocent spirits. The good
are dying under the terror of the body. They have lost any faith in goodness. Their
survival is in question. The bad destructive powers are becoming powerful and
are helping to destroy this present civilization. Now, this is all in reference to the
collapse of traditional social arrangement in Europe. A kind of apocalypse is
shown through these lines. Another significant phrase in these lines is
the ceremony of innocence is drowned. We all feel that good people are tortured
more They have to face miseries and pains more than the people who are devilish.
The evil who has tried to govern this world through bloodshed and all evil
activities, the good they suffer at the hands of the bad people a lot. So, the poet is
in a way being very personal here because maybe he being a good moralistic man
had to suffer a lot in his own life.
In the second stanza, the inevitable collapse of systems and society is predicted.
A big revelation something soon seems to be coming up. It is seen in the store.
The present conditions have aroused or instigated the storm now announcing the
second coming in the New Testament. This phrase “the second coming” says that
Christ will return to redeem the sins of man. Once again when this world will be
full of mysteries of man. Christ will be forced to walk in again on this earth but
as he speaks this phrase the spirit of this world that is the Spiritus Mundi makes
Yeats feel as if a monster has arisen from its sleep and had started coming towards
them. It is like Phoenix or the monster with it lion’s body and a human face which
is slowly advancing with the blank gaze and with no pity and the comparison is
made to the Sun, that means the Sun also doesn’t have pity on humans so similarly
this monster is coming without any pity or sympathy for the humans. So these are
quite disturbing thoughts indicating the collapse or total degeneration of
civilization. The darkness is here and so the terror, chaos, world war all
responsible to arouse this monster will witness the end of this world. It’s almost
been 2,000 years since Christ came to earth in human form and was crucified but
now a rough beast will reveal itself these times are not for Christ in human form.
Things have changed and this disastrous time cannot be controlled by any human
spirit. It needs a monster to wake us up from our 2000 years of deep sleep. It will
rock us shake us from our deep slumber. It has already started its journey towards
Bethlem where it will be shown first. The phrase slouches towards Bethlehem
imparts the visual through words the biblical reference of Bethlehem when Christ
was born there. The poem ends with a question mark, “will this be his mystical
belief that history repeats itself in cycles? This, it is very obvious with the images
of a tire which is widening and moving apart from the point of origin losing
control of the centre maybe Yeats is trying to decentre Christianity. The faith is
lost. The centre cannot hold things; therefore, the second coming will be from
another deity, some other religious philosophy. So, it is coming to fulfil the
prophecy from the Biblical Book of Revelation. It is the new Messiah coming
either to redeem or to destroy.
Central points:
1. The time of the poem - just after the First World War.
2. The poem shows the memories of the Easter Rising in Ireland.
3. The revolution is broken out in Russia.
4. There are different trajectories of crises in the world.
5. On socio cultural scale there is a state of flux and chaos.
6. The poem refers to the idea that Jesus will return to Earth towards the end of time to
bring justice and order.
7. Yeats does not express a Christian interpretation of the end of the days.
8. Yeats believed in a complex set of ideas to do with ‘gyres’,
9. Gyre refers to cone-shaped spirals representing the essential historical and individual
forces offering transitions into new worlds.
10. The first eight lines of the poem offer a complex vision of an apocalypse. Apocalyptic
consciousness is pervading throughout .
11. The beginning - "turning and turning in the widening gyre," locates the whole poem
inside an expanding gyre,
12. It shows that something is moving and changing,
13. The world will never be the same.
14. With the second line in the text of the poem an uncertain image is visible.
15. In the second section ,Yeats presents a disturbing image of a sphinx ‘out of Spiritus
Mundi’
16. Spiritus Mundi’ denotes the ‘spirit of the world’ .
17. In the context of the poem Spiritus Mundi’ refers to Yeats’s belief that every mind is
linked to a single vast intelligence. It also suggests the storehouse of imagination.
18. “The falcon, has lost touch with its falconer” suggests that the "falcon," which likely
represents humanity, has become detached from its "falconer,"
19. This glimpse of the new order after two thousand years of Christianity is not a
comforting one
20. The poet concludes the work at a note of astonishment about the nature of this ‘rough
beast’ that ‘Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born’
2.2 .Main Themes
1. Humanity
2. Criticism of Culture
3. Moral dichotomy
4. Loss of spirituality
5. Cycle of time
6. Revelation
7. Modern Civilization
2.3. Features of Style:
1. Symbolism
2. Imagery
3. Illustrations
4. Allusions
5. Rhythmic and structured order
6. Sounding effects
7. Conviction in the ordering of the images
Symbols :
1. The Gyre
2. The Falcon
3. The falconer
4. The Spiritus Mundi
5. Darkness
6. Desert
7. Rough beast
The Second Coming at a glance
Publishing
The Dial (1920)
Michael Robertes and the Dancer (1921)
Written ByWilliam Butler Yeats
Form / Style
Two stanzas, composed of 8 and 14 lines respectively
Meter
A very loose iambic pentameter that is so inconsistent it is closer to free verse
Rhyme Scheme
Aside from two rhyming couplets at the beginning, no rhyme scheme
Poetic Devices
Allegory, alliteration, allusion, assonance, hyperbole, metaphor, symbolism
Notable Imagery
The falcon in the gyre, the desert sphinx-like creature, the rocking cradleKey Themes
Anarchy, apocalypse, Christianity, prophesy, violence
Meaning
While 'The Second Coming' is notoriously hard to pin down, it describes the state of Europe after WWI. The poem emphasizes that humanity itself might be on the brink of an apocalyptic future, circling around conflict and violence.
Comments
Post a Comment