Yeats and 'The Second Coming'

[dandan]

Check out the 1st stanza of "The Second Coming" and tell me that it is not the most chilling prophecy of the World Trade Center tragedy.
The best lack all conviction/while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
spot on if you ask me.
Well done Willie..........awesome.

[Scheherazade]

'Second Coming' is a great poem but to see it as the prophecy of a single event is rather limiting in my opinion.

As a reminder, please note that discussion of currect politics is not allowed.

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[earthboar]

I read something prophetic to modern times also, but not to that one mentioned by dandan. I guess that says something about the Rorschach-subjectivity of prophecy, that it is a dance partner looking for a willing imagination to lead.

[mono]

Check out the 1st stanza of "The Second Coming" and tell me that it is not the most chilling prophecy of the World Trade Center tragedy.
The best lack all conviction/while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
spot on if you ask me.
Well done Willie..........awesome.
I have a lot of difficulty understanding and seeing this interpretation. Without, of course, discussing any politics, could you please offer a more detailed interpretation, citing in the poem where you see precise references to the event? For anyone who has not read the poem --

The Second Coming

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?
I must place stress that Yeats wrote this at about the end of the first World War. Influenced by both Christianity and Paganism, I find the poem's subject rather obviously referring to an actual 'second coming,' as stated in The Bible and the apparent arrival of some Anti-Christ. Inspired by the commotion and stress of a world war, I find this understandable as a subject, slightly exaggerated, but relevant, nonetheless.

[Virgil]

We discussewd this poem in the old Poem of the Week thread and it went on for a few pages here: http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13557&page=9&pp=15&highlight=poem+week

Apparently it was the Russian revolution that inpsired it, but I can see dandan's point. Falcon/airplane, lack of conviction/passionate intensity, center not holding (collapsing buildings), anarchy loose in the world. Although I wouldn't call it a prophesy.

[earthboar]

In a roundabout way, I see the falcon, not as an airplane, but as soldiers of an army. The falconer is who is in charge of the army. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, just as it does not hold in any army too far displaced from its center, throughout history. It is a demonstrable "fact" that the further away an army from its locus of authority, the more atrocious aspect of human nature emerges: Kublai Khan's Mongol Horde, the Crusades, Baatan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, Mai Lai...and "current" examples. In short, it may be prophetic only because history repreats itself. Wherever grand ambition leads a military campaign, the same catastrophes befall the world as a whole, not just any one place or event. It's the "best laid plans of mice and men" phenomenon. Well, that's my take. We observe something, write it down, 60 years goes by, something similar happens again, we say, "prophetic".

[DrBill]

I slouch into my class, bowed by the brute,
apocalyptic shock. No student’s eyes
forsake the glowing screen; the sound is mute.
Their center, Yeats’s vatic lines forewarn, flies
apart, a deluge soundless as white soot,
tsunami boiling dust from toppled skies,
benumbs the class, makes exegesis moot,
and drowns the innocent in stifled sighs.

The students stir, but no one leaves or speaks
so I’m not forced to feign I understand
indignant desert birds until next week’s
remarks on beasts that stalk the troubled sand.
I chew my lip and mumble class dismissed;
follow them out, my pockets crammed with fist.

Yeats and "September 12"


The scene is an Introduction to Literature class at the University of Hartford; the students that week were to take up Yeats’s famous poem, “The Second Coming.” Early drafts described the horror of the burning towers. This is the next morning's reaction; the eerily silent students represent the numbing shock. A third of the students came from the New York City-New Jersey area.

Yeats's vatic lines allude to his theosophical system that under girds "The Second Coming," particularly his subscription to the cyclical notion of history, which forms and reforms in "gyres." Without getting into the abstruse system expounded in A Vision, Yeats, following Vico and preceding Joyce, believed in a kind of Platonic year that changes the course of history. The title "The Second Coming" is wholly ironic because what emerges from the sands of the desert is not a Christ-like but a satanic figure.

Three poems in Yeats illustrate historic points: "Leda and the Swan"; "The Mother of God"; and "The Second Coming," events separated by about 2,000 years. These are vatic or prophetic poems. But "The Second Coming" proceeds as well to define contemporary events: the terrorism of the Irish troubles and Civil War, and the Russian Revolution a year or so before the poem was written: in either case, the violence of a "rough beast" will dominate the cycle [e.g., the wars of the Twentieth Century.] In “The Second Coming,” as in “September 12,” the “ceremony of innocence is drowned" and "the worst are full of passionate intensity." On the morning of September 12, a new era slouched into undergraduate minds in a university classroom. The "troubled sand" in “September 12” also echoes "Troubles my sight" in "The Second Coming," at the bestial archetype that rises from the "Spiritus mundi," or world spirit, uncannily parallel to the contemporary theory of Carl Jung’s Collective Unconscious.

Since the universal unconscious resides in everyone, archetypal symbols and patterns provide a basis for the universality of poetry, making the whole world shocked kin. Thus, the allusion gives symbolic meaning not only Yeats's poem and the intellectual Zeitgeist of (1919-1920) but also to the crumbling towers in “September 12.”

[aeroport]

Interesting things being said here, and on the Poem of the Week thread.

This is one of my favorite poems, and I'm finding that, strange as the man is, I really rather like Yeats. The only thing I would add to this discussion is that, while indeed the Russian Revolution was not long before the publication of this poem, and WWI was coming to a close, the Easter Rising was only a little while before the Rusian Rev and lasted a rather long time (4, 5 years?). When he wrote this poem, the Irish War of Independence - in his back-yard - was only just beginning. I guess I tend to attach this poem more to the matter of Ireland, since that was where he was living at the time - indeed, the place was obviously pretty important to him, as he was the one really excellent literary artist of the time who didn't leave the country! (Even if he did cloister himself off in the Thoor Ballylee...)
What I really dig about this poem, though, is the maturity it illustrates. A while before (sort of leading to the Rising), there was Cathleen Ni Houlihan, which has always seemed to me a rather empty piece of military propaganda - a cry to take up arms on a premise founded on ancient mythology. (Obviously, the cause was nifty - getting the oppressor out and all that - but as art, I can't say it struck me with much resonance.) Then we have "Easter 1916":

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream
...
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.

...and so on. A very different, even - if I may venture to say it - contradictory, or matured, perspective here. No more of the youthful call-to-arms; people have now died over it. He enumerates a few at the end. And now the constant hostility for the cause has "enchanted to a stone" the hearts of the Irish. This, to me, relates to the "worst" being "full of passionate intensity".

Regarding the Spiritus Mundi, according to the Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature, "Yeats defined this as a 'general storehouse of images which have ceased to be a property of any personality or spirit'."
The religious references still trouble me a little in interpreting this piece. I'm still not sure about the "shadows of indignant desert birds", and I remain at about 5 on the certainty scale with regard to his thoughts on the end of Christianity. Maybe 6... 6.5. I think he's possibly glad for it. "The darkness drops again" - i.e. night falls; symbolically, we can assume some uncertainty or apprehension is present; "but now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleep / Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle..." [advent of Christianity - that is, bad stuff started happening, [I]nightmarish things, when Christianity popped up]. So I'm led to wonder if he is actually attributing these awful things to Christianity. Remember, his sight is "troubled" by the Christian connotations of the term "Second Coming". The Biblical idea of it holds no real value for him.
Now, both the The Field Day and his Collected Poems have the question mark at the end, which is kind of irritating me, because when I read it previously it definitely wasn't there. If we look at the last four and a half lines, beginning with "but now I know", we see that it is, in fact, all one sentence, rendering the question mark grammatically incorrect. The second part of that sentence, then, the last set of clauses, goes with the introduction, just like the first does (I tell you, when you learn this trick, it unlocks the whole bloody language - and makes James readable!): "but now I know...what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born." Certainty! Forgive the pun, but you might say he knows "the nature of the beast". If we look at all this as a good thing, I think we can probably say that "rough beast", though it sounds pretty foreboding at first (kind of like, y'know, the whole poem!), can be interpreted simply as something wild and unchained, or natural. I guess he was rather into mysticism, so this certainly doesn't seem unlikely to me, this casting off of the overly-structured and problematic.

EDIT
Wow, it actually all seems more clear to me after writing this. But then, it's 5 a.m., and anything can sound alright at that hour. (I know the two things I've set down here - my political and religious interpretations - don't really compliment each other very well, and I'm actually leaning a little more towards the latter, but I'll leave it all for the sake of discussion.) I'm going to bed now...

[DrBill]

Misintepretation: twenty centuries AFTER the "rocking cradle," which illustrates Yeats's cyclical theory of history, as mentioned in an earlier post.
The "gyres" and the Platonic year can be found in Yeats's "A Vision," (1926, 1937).

[aeroport]

Misintepretation: twenty centuries AFTER the "rocking cradle," which illustrates Yeats's cyclical theory of history, as mentioned in an earlier post.

I'm not sure what you mean. The line, in prose, is "twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle". This sounds to me like a "rocking cradle" created a nightmare, after two millenia. And now the nightmare, after another two millenia, is about to end, as the "rough beast" prepares to enter the world.

[carpenoctem]

I am afraid it has nothing to do with World Trade Center or nowadays politics. I quote: "The best lack all conviction/while the worst are full of passionate intensity". "The best" refers to the Irish people of the 1920. Notice that the poem was published in 1921 and as a result of the War of Independence and Partition between Ireland and Great Britain (1919-1921). "The worst" refers, obviously, to the British soldiers and Unionists who killed so many innocent Irish peasants who did not know what was really going on, they were sent to fight unarmed, defenceless, against the British troops by opportunist politicians such as Maud Gonne (whom Yeats had dedicated "No Second Troy" in 1910), who took private advantage of the conflict. it is clear that "The Second Coming" that the poet is talking about is that of the "Anti-Christ", Yeats thought that the Christian era was likely to be two thousand years in extent and now was the turn of the "Anti-Christ": "And what rough beast ... Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?".

moreover, "Spiritus Mundi" is a well known Medieval Text that informs Christian about what they have to do to die in the Grace of God. See: http://www.sciforums.com/Spiritus-Mundi-t-2731.html

[GilbertWarfield]

Misintepretation: twenty centuries AFTER the "rocking cradle," which illustrates Yeats's cyclical theory of history, as mentioned in an earlier post.
The "gyres" and the Platonic year can be found in Yeats's "A Vision," (1926, 1937).
:flare::flare::flare:

[bry]

I think the key to this poem is the second line. "the falcon cannot hear the falconer". Yeats may have been suggesting that the negative events from history(the falconer/teacher) will repeat in a similar way if history is not studied by modern man(the falcon/student). The rest of the poem is just powerful imagery of the the conflict chaos and damage that results.

[forumrox]

hehehe check meh name:flare:

[HectorDarley]

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[layna]

hi, i'm new to this site. i'm currently studying yeats in a literature course and finding some of his works a bit hard to understand. But i like 'adams song', 'sailing to byzantium' and 'solomon to sheba'.
We are looking indepthly at the second coming atm and your infomation has been very useful :) thanks :)

[oshyjoshy]

The way i interpreted the first few lines of the poem was that Yeats' persona speaks about how broken our world and society has become. "The falcon cannot hear the falconer" symbolizes society breaking away from authority. The falcon is symbolic for society/humans and the falconer is sybolic for law and authority. We are given the image of a falcon flying far away from its master, no longer listening to its orders. This stands to show that in Yeats' mind, society is moving away from authority and no longer listening. When joined with line threes idea of anarchy being loosed upon the world, the idea makes sense. The use of the falcon (a bird) also emphasizes the destruction that the sphinx (beast with a lion body) can cause. Felines are natural predators of birds, the falcon is sybolic for humans therefore the sphinx is a natural predator of humans as well. Also the idea of a falcon being detached from its master emphasizes the fact that the sphinx is a complete connection of man and animal which is opposite to the brokeness of our world and society as said in lines 2-4, which almost acts as a prelude to the apocalypse that it will cause in order to create connectiveness once again.

[Darcy88]

I simply can't read this poem enough times. It haunts me. In a good and a bad way.