Page 377 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

British Poetry

Notes And finally, as a father, he hopes that she will be betrothed to a man who has for ever steered away
from detestation and arrogance which is so common everywhere. Let the house of her husband be
comfortable and secure but not at the expense of anyone.

30.4 W. B. Yeats: Second Coming and as an Irish Poet

30.4.1 Second Coming–Summary

Summary
The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening “gyre” (spiral), cannot
hear the falconer; “Things fall apart; the center 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 anthologized 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 centers 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).

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