Soundpoem -- high bandwidth needed
“THE SECOND COMING” by Yeats
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?
Analysis
Written in 1921, "The Second Coming" is a poem full of foreboding. Yeats feels that the world is changing, that the traditional Christian order is coming to an end, possibly to be replaced by a civilisation with lesser values. The poem refers to the cataclysmic chaos that many felt to be near at this time -- WW1 had wasted the lives of millions, the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1919 had killed millions more, the Russian Empire had fallen to the Bolsheviks, and faith in Western rationality had been badly injured.
The situation in Ireland was important for Yeats. The Catholic majority in Ireland, governed at this point by Britain, had been disappointed in their hopes for Home Rule, and the failed revolt of Easter 1916 had ended in the execution of most of the participants - this is commemorated in his poem "Easter 1916". The IRA engaged in the then novel techniques of guerilla war and Britain responded by forming the notorious regiments of the "Black and Tans" who created much terror among Irish civilians. The fighting ended in 1922 when Ireland was partitioned, but only after much bloodshed.
The poem begins with an image of things spiralling out of control; the falcon (an image of a hunter) cannot hear its master. The first stanza suggests that few come out of the fighting with much honour. The second stanza turns to Biblical imagery; the idea of a Second, but destructive coming, of a prophetic figure mixes with the Egyptian sphinx, which symbolised to Yeats the birth of a new age. The suggestion that this is a 'rough beast' about to be born conveys Yeats' fear that the new age will bring only more brutality.