William Butler Yeats, the celebrated Irish
poet, in his 1919 epoch-making poem, “The Second Coming” shows us a vision of
full of apocalyptic, ritualistic and mystical symbolism. Drawing on the image
of a falcon that has flown too far and on the notion of a catastrophic flood,
the speaker sums up the spirit of his age, which is characterized by anarchy,
violence, and the inversion of values. “The Second Coming", in its
entirety, is an astounding encapsulation of Yeats' idea of the gyre and his
fears about the future of mankind; it is expertly woven with threads of
prophetic literary reference and impressive poetic techniques.
The speaker of
this poem is someone capable of seeing beyond the things. He is a poet-prophet
of sorts. Yeats uses a bunch of metaphors and to evaluate the present state of
affairs.
The first stanza is a
powerful description of apocalypse, opening with the indelible image of the
falcon circling ever higher, in ever-widening spirals, so far that soon it is out of earshot.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre
cannot hold
Over the
course of his life, Yeats created a complex system of mystical philosophy,
using the image of interlocking conical gyres, to symbolize his philosophical
belief that all things could be described in terms of cycles and patterns. With the image of the gyre, Yeats
created a shorthand reference in his poetry that stood for his entire
philosophy of history and spirituality.
The Second
Coming drenches the reader in a
storm of language and imagination. It dazzles and penetrates with a force
rarely seen in English poetry. “The
falcon cannot hear the falconer” paints a vivid image of the natural order
coming apart. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” describes an
onslaught of destruction matter-of-factly. Yeats
luminous language paints the human world in its arresting beauty and jarring
turmoil:
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
“Surely some
revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.”
So, the speaker is left with a strong
prophetic vision. Yeats’ bleakly
apocalyptic vision is simply irresistible. At the end of the poem, he asks a rhetorical question
which really amounts to a prophecy. The beast—a harbinger of the new
epoch—is on its way to Bethlehem, the birthplace
of Christ, to be born into the world. For Yeats, the Second Coming was
not a literal return of Christ, but the arrival of savage, atavistic forces:
the death and birth pangs of an old epoch making way for the new.
The darkness
drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Though
"The Second Coming" is short, it is packed with symbols and visions
that are hard to untangle. It has been said that the essence of great poems is
their mystery, and that is certainly true of “The Second Coming.” It is a
mystery, it describes a mystery, it offers distinct and resonant images, but
opens itself to infinite layers of interpretation.
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.”
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?