Summary
The speaker describes
a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening “gyre” (spiral), cannot
hear the falconer; “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”; anarchy is
loosed upon the world; “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The
ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The best people, the speaker says, lack all
conviction, but the worst “are full of passionate intensity.”
Surely, the speaker
asserts, the world is near a revelation; “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”
No sooner does he think of “the Second Coming,” then he is troubled by “a vast
image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the
collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx (“A shape
with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the
sun”) is moving, while the shadows of desert birds reel about it. The darkness
drops again over the speaker’s sight, but he knows that the sphinx’s twenty
centuries of “stony sleep” have been made a nightmare by the motions of “a
rocking cradle.” And what “rough beast,” he wonders, “its hour come round at
last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
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 anthologised 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 centres 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:
The end of an age, which always receives the
revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of
one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to its place of
greatest contraction... The revelation [that] approaches will... take its
character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre...
In other words, the
world’s trajectory along the gyre of science, democracy, and heterogeneity is
now coming apart, like the frantically widening flight-path of the falcon that
has lost contact with the falconer; the next age will take its character not
from the gyre of science, democracy, and speed, but from the contrary inner
gyre—which, presumably, opposes mysticism, primal power, and slowness to the
science and democracy of the outer gyre. The “rough beast” slouching toward
Bethlehem is the symbol of this new age; the speaker’s vision of the rising
sphinx is his vision of the character of the new world.
This seems quite silly
as philosophy or prophecy (particularly in light of the fact that it has not
come true as yet). But as poetry, and understood more broadly than as a simple
reiteration of the mystic theory of A Vision, “The
Second Coming” is a magnificent statement about the contrary forces at work in
history, and about the conflict between the modern world and the ancient world.
The poem may not have the thematic relevance of Yeats’s best work, and may not
be a poem with which many people can personally identify; but the aesthetic
experience of its passionate language is powerful enough to ensure its value
and its importance in Yeats’s work as a whole.
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