“The Second Coming.” How to Deconstruct Yeats’s Poem. Apocalypse Now.

Yeats’s poetry can be a challenge: it is often highly allusive and can contain references to Yeats’s personal vision of time and history, which can be stumbling blocks to reading and understanding, especially for a first read. However, in the more accessible poems these traits serve to intensify meaning and do not obscure it (see Post Leda and the Swan). The word-choice and images in The Second Coming make clear the darkly prophetic nature of the poem.

***

***

The onomatapoetic Turning and turning suggests a slow, relentless circling, enhanced by the equally onomatapoetic widening, finally clarified with the word, gyre, which is a spiral. So a heavy element is immediately introduced.¹ A falcon often flies in a spiral in order to keep focus on its target, in this case the person who released it, and keeps it centered. Metaphorically, the world, like the falcon, is spiraling out of control, creating chaos. In the forcefully blunt stressed syllables of Things fall apart, you can hear the thud. (This mastery of expression is a main reason for my considering Yeats one of the greatest of all Engish-speaking poets.) So universal are the sentiments in this first stanza that the next four words are among the most famous in poetry: the centre cannot hold. Both literally and metaphorically, the world/life is becoming increasingly unanchored, valueless: mere anarchy is loosed upon a blood-dimmed tide, in which innocence is drowned. We have lost our moral center in a perversion of values: The best (of men) lack all conviction , while the worst of men have the most passionate conviction of their beliefs.

Yeats envisioned history in 2000 year cycles, so we are due for a new cycle. The second stanza speculates on what our new “cycle” will be, a Second Coming. In Christian and Islamic theology, this is the belief that Jesus Christ will return to Earth after his ascension to Heaven; the Ascension is said to have occurred about two thousand years ago (Yeats’s “cycle”).  In this new Second Coming cycle, it will retain the apocalyptic nature of some traditional versions, but none of the redemptive qualities–another perversion of belief. Referring to the Second Coming causes a vision (vast image) out of Spiritus Mundi,² the spirit, or collective unconsious, of the world) to appear to the poet. This deeply troubling image envisions a sphinx-like creature with A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. Unlike Jesus’s redemptive love toward man, this creature is indifferent and “pitiless,” with no feeling or heart in its eyes (A gaze blank), its indifference beating down on man like perpetual sun as it lumbers (the heavy stresses of moving its slow thighs) across the lifeless-implied desert, a symbol of death and nothingness (the carrion birds circling it).

The final four lines–part of a somewhat sonnet-like structure of–variation, conclusion–begins with the dissolution of the vision (The darkness drops again), with the poet having gained new perception (but now I know). The just-ending last 2000 year cycle was nothing but stony sleep, suspended in a state of oblivion and impotence. But that sleep may be peferable to what’s coming next, rudely awakened (vexed) to nightmare by another birth (rocking cradle) as was the current one. Though Christ’s promise of redemption has not been fulfilled, stony sleep is preferable to vexing nightmare as described in the first stanza. What new dire entity, a lumbering, drooping, sphinx-like beast , will be unleashed, with its slow thighs and pitiless gaze, devoid of humanity, slowly and implacably advancing towards (Slouches) a new Bethlehem, on its way to its apocalypic birth: Surely some revelation is at hand/Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

***

1. this was written in 1919, just after the First World War, one of the most devastating wars in history, ↩︎
2. Latin for “world spirit” or “soul of the world,” is a concept representing a universal memory, a collective unconscious, and a source of images and symbols. Popularized by Yeats as a mystical, creative reservoir, it acts as a “muse” for writers and artists, providing archetypal inspiration.  ↩︎

***

Subscribing only means that you will receive a notice when I publish a new post.

***

***