“The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats

 W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats, (born June 13, 1865, Sandymount, Dublin, Ireland—died January 28, 1939, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France), Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. 
In 1887, Yeats took up the life of a professional writer. He joined the Theosophical Society, whose mysticism appealed to him because it was a form of imaginative life far removed from the workaday world. The age of science was repellent to Yeats; he was a visionary, and he insisted upon surrounding himself with poetic images. He began a study of the prophetic books of William Blake, and this enterprise brought him into contact with other visionary traditions, such as the Platonic, the Neoplatonic, the Swedenborgian, and the alchemical. 
He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

"The Second Coming"

https://youtu.be/IY2oIsA4c7k

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 

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.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

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?

Comment

The Second Coming

                    The Second Coming is a poem written in 1919 by the Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats. Obvious as it is, WWI had a lot to do with the catastrophic view that the author feeds the poem with.

                    In the first stanza we see things colliding. That “centre”, as Yeats says, is being torn apart, creating chaos. This is meaningful since it can be a clear reference to the effects of WWI: the world as they knew it before the war is no longer there, only destruction and death are. The fact that “The best lack all conviction” shows how good people have lost their path and hope, because those who are evil have gained power with their actions, believing they are right by doing whatever they do, thus turning the world upside-down (“the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”). Morality is lost, and with that, the fate of humanity. In fact, in line two “the falcon cannot hear the falconer” is a metaphor comparing that to the human being unable of hearing whatever it was that was keeping the world as it was before WWI, be it reason, morality, or else.

                       With regards to the second stanza, there are also several things of a notorious relevance. The thing that attracts the reader’s attention the most is the expression “the Second Coming”, since it is this expression which gives name to the poem. Of course, this is a reference to Christianism, to Jesus’ returning to Earth to save the worthy. The narrative persona is sure that this is about to happen because the world could not be any more messed up. However, it seems that what comes is not Jesus but a beast, whose description we should pay attention to. The reason beyond this is that it is described as “with lion body and the head of a man”, telling us that the human being has become a monster, a beast capable to destroy everything and making future look just as dark as it seems at that moment. What we see in this stanza, and especially in the las verses, is the delusion towards the Christian morality, which has failed to succeed in making people kind, loving and generous; instead the human being has become an evil, selfish and cruel race, leading to that massive destruction of the “Great War”.

                         With all this in mind, we could say that this is an outstanding literary work not only because there are a lot of meanings underlying the verses but also because it shows the view of the world which many modernist writers had at that time. Besides, the poem shows no hope regarding the future of the world but despair, something which characterized the modernist writers.