Yeats began writing his poem ’The Second Coming’ in January 1919, in the wake of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and political turmoil in his native Ireland. Yeats’ poem illustrates a disturbing vision of a dark and mysterious alternative to the Christian idea of the Second Coming of Christ. The poem captures the anxiety and concerns of declining morality, fears of a social disaster, and the feeling that the world is on the verge of collapse…
The poem’s first stanza describes a worldly system which is out of order. The underlying metrical pattern of the poem is in iambic pentameter, however the poem abruptly begins with an emphatic trochee: the extra syllable creating a sense of metrical pressure, mirroring the atmosphere of confusion that Yeats is depicting. The diacope, ’Turning and turning in the widening gyre’, creates a sense of disorientation. The metaphorical gyre, which nods to Yeat’s mystical belief that history repeats itself in cycles, is ‘widening’, suggesting that it is getting further and further away from its centre. This sense of collapse is exemplified by Yeats’ assertion that ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’. The caesura emphasises the speaker’s matter of fact and detached tone, which serves to highlight the perceived inevitability of global disintegration. Yeats’ use of the present tense is in contrast to the Christian belief that Jesus will come back to Earth so save mankind, instead, Yeats offers little hope that the ‘mere anarchy’ is expected to come to an end.
The ubiquitousness of Yeats’ poem accentuates its harrowing nature. The ambiguous setting that Yeats draws upon, ‘somewhere in the sands of the desert’ creates a sense of universality. Yeats’ choice of the noun ‘desert’ evokes an inhospitable landscape, and the sibilant sounds bring the sound of the desert to life, suggesting winds blowing sand across the barren landscape. The source of the disorder that the speaker prophesies is not confined to the Christian world. Instead, the ‘Spiritus Mundi’ (meaning ‘spirit of the world’) is Yeats’ name for the collective unconscious of humanity. Yeats believed in mankind’s collective soul that included a store of images and symbols that he drew upon as inspiration for his poetry. The ‘shape with lion body and the head of a man’ is an image typically connected to the Sphinx, a status found in Giza, Egypt. Thus, Yeats is drawing upon imagery which belongs to different civilisations from the Christian one, effectively decanting Christianity from its secure place in western society.
Yeats’ disturbing vision depicts a pandemic of the global collapse of morality. Yeats draws an antithesis between the ‘best’ who ‘lack all conviction’, and the ‘worst’ who are ‘full of passionate intensity’, creating a clear contrast between the good and evil in the world. Yeats suggests that evil is characterised by a ‘blood-dimmed tide’, a possible reference to the bloody consequences of human violence and hatred that had been evidenced in the First World War. Yeats describes the ‘rough beast[’s]’ ‘blank’ look on its face, which is as ‘pitiless as the sun’, characterising it as cold, unforgiving and incapable of showing empathy. The hybrid of a man’s head and lion’s body merges human intellect and potential with man’s tendency towards animalistic violence and chaos.
The speaker’s vision ends with ‘The darkness drops [dropping] again’, implying that that a metaphorical darkness has been drawn over humanity as it undergoes Yeats’ harrowing prophecy. Yeats suggests that the two thousand years following the birth of Christ have been an illusion, which have been disturbed into a ‘nightmare by a rocking cradle’. The ‘cradle’ can be interpreted as the birth of Christ, but the lexis of horror indicates that the rebirth that the poem predicts is the antithesis of Jesus’ heroic homecoming. This can be read as a subconscious foreboding of further global conflict, for example World War Two, or it could align with twenty first century concerns over the climate crisis.
Yeats’ second stanza provides a personal perspective on his disturbing vision. The anaphoras of the subjective intensifier, ‘Surely’ presents the speaker’s desperation that his vision is incorrect, and that the prophecies of the Bible will come into fruition
The polyptoton, ‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer’ suggests that humans are losing control over their environment, as the world descends into chaos.
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