The Second Coming (poem)
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"The Second Coming" is a poem by William Butler Yeats first printed in The Dial (November 1920) and afterwards included in his 1921 verse collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses religious symbolism to illustrate Yeats' anguish over the apparent decline of Europe's ruling class, and his occult belief that Western Civilization (if not the whole world) was nearing the terminal point of a 2000-year historical cycle.
The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War. The various manuscript revisions of the poem also have references to the French and Irish Revolutions as well as to Germany and Russia. It is highly doubtful that the poem was solely inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which some claim Yeats viewed as a threat to the aristocratic class he favored.
Early drafts also included such lines as: "And there's no Burke to cry aloud no Pitt," and "The good are wavering, while the worst prevail."[citation needed]
The sphinx or sphinx-like beast described in the poem had long captivated Yeats' imagination. He wrote the Introduction to his play The Resurrection, "I began to imagine [around 1904], as always at my left side just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast which I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction", noting that the beast was "Afterwards described in my poem 'The Second Coming'".
Critic Yvor Winters has observed, ". . . we must face the fact that Yeats' attitude toward the beast is different from ours: we may find the beast terrifying, but Yeats finds him satisfying - he is Yeats' judgment upon all that we regard as civilized. Yeats approves of this kind of brutality."
Manuscript variations can be found in: Yeats, William Butler. "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" Manuscript Materials. Thomas Parkinson and Anne Brannen, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
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[edit] Poem
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?
[edit] Origins of terms
The word gyre used in the poem's first line is drawn from Yeats's book A Vision, which sets out a theory of history and metaphysics which Yeats claimed to have received from spirits. The theory of history articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram composed of two conical spirals, one situated inside the other, so that the widest part of one cone occupies the same plane as the tip of the other cone, and vice versa. Around these cones he imagined a set of spirals. Yeats claimed that this image (he called the spirals "gyres") captured contrary motions inherent within the process of history, and he divided each gyre into different regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual's development). Yeats believed that in 1921 the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic moment, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre.
In his own notes, Yeats explained: "The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction. At the present moment the life gyre is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ which was narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest expansion. The revelation which approaches will however take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre. All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, heterogeneous civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash, though in a flash that will not strike only in one place, and will for a time be constantly repeated, of the civilization that must slowly take its place...when the revelation comes it will not come to the poor but to the great and learned and establish again for two thousand years prince and vizier."
The lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" are a paraphrase of one of the most famous passages from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a book which Yeats, by his own admission, regarded from his childhood with religious awe:
- In each human heart terror survives
- The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear
- All that they would disdain to think were true:
- Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
- The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
- They dare not devise good for man's estate,
- And yet they know not that they do not dare.
The phrase "stony sleep" is drawn from The Book of Urizen by William Blake (one of the poets Yeats studied most intensely). In Blake's poem, Urizen falls, unable to bear the battle in heaven he has provoked. To ward off the fiery wrath of his vengeful brother Eternals, he frames a rocky womb for himself: "But Urizen laid in a stony sleep / Unorganiz'd, rent from Eternity." During this stony sleep, Urizen goes through seven ages of creation-birth as fallen man, until he emerges. This is the man who becomes the Sphinx of Egypt.
In the early drafts of the poem, Yeats used the phrase "the Second Birth", but substituted the phrase "Second Coming" while revising. His intent in doing so is not clear. The Second Coming described in the Biblical Book of Revelation is here anticipated as a gathering dark forces that would fill the population's need for meaning with a ghastly and dangerous sense of purpose. Though Yeats's description has nothing in common with the typically envisioned Christian concept of the Second Coming of Christ, it fits with his view that something strange and heretofore unthinkable would come to succeed Christianity, just as Christ transformed the world upon his appearance.
The "spiritus mundi" (literally "spirit of the world") is a reference to Yeats' belief that each human mind is linked to a single vast intelligence, and that this intelligence causes certain universal symbols to appear in individual minds. The idea is similar to Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious.
[edit] Allusions to the poem
The poem includes several phrases that subsequently became famous, such as "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." Chinua Achebe titled his most famous novel Things Fall Apart (1958), prefacing the book with the poem's first four lines. Achebe's novel adheres to Yeats' theme by evincing the sudden collapse of African societies in the age of European colonialism. The second volume of Harry Turtledove's American Empire trilogy was entitled The Center Cannot Hold. Robert B. Parker titled two of his Spenser private detective novels in reference to the poem: Ceremony (1982), from the line The ceremony of innocence is drowned, and The Widening Gyre (1983) from the first line of the poem.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. used "The Second Coming" as the epigraph to his book The Vital Center. More than a half-century later, he claimed that the poem had been "less of a cliché in 1948" than it had become.[1]
The poem's final phrase, "what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" is another of Yeats' best-known lines. Joan Didion's 1968 collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, takes its title from the poem, as do Joni Mitchell's song of the same name on her album Night Ride Home, a semi-faithful rendition of Yeats' poem into song, the interactive fiction game Slouching Towards Bedlam, and an episode from season 4 of Angel. In the comic series "The Tick," the title superhero humorously paraphrases the line as "What rough beast slouches towards Ninja World at four-thirty in the morning?"
The Armageddon Rag, a 1983 novel by George R. R. Martin, is about a fictional rock band called the Nazgûl who have set Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" to music as an apocalyptic rock-'n'-roll composition. This song is quoted repeatedly in the novel and builds up to the climactic scene of its performance at a rock concert.
Stephen King rather appropriately makes repeated references to the poem in his post-apocalyptic novel The Stand (1978), in which a plague-ravaged world is divided into good and evil camps. At one point, the mysterious villain of the piece, Randall Flagg, vividly imagines himself as the "rough beast" being born in the chaos brought about by a superflu epidemic.
In 1986, Arthur Schlesinger, in his The Cycles of American History, again referenced this poem with prophetic paraphrase: "Still, let us not be complacent. Should private interest fail today and public purpose thereafter, what rought beast, its hour come round at last, may be slouching toward Washington to be born?"
In the 1987 film Wall Street, Gordon Gekko,played by Michael Douglas turns to Bud(Charlie Sheen), during a conversation where Bud tries to convince Gekko to buy "Bluestar Airlines" and says "so the falcon cannot hear the falconer".
Conservative judge Robert H. Bork used the poem as an inspiration for the title of his 1996 book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline. In response, syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage chose Skipping Towards Gomorrah as the title for his 2003 book (ISBN 0-45-228416-3).
Librettist Myfanwy Piper included the line "The ceremony of innocence is drowned" into the dialogue of the ghosts of Peter Quint and the former governess, Miss Jessel, in Benjamin Britten's opera, The Turn of the Screw (opera).
The band Electric Six mentions slouching toward Bethlehem in their song "Jimmy Carter".
Adam Cohen, in the New York Times on 12 February 2006 commented how the poem has been used more and more as a metaphor for the war in Iraq.
In the documentary "Who the Fuck is Pete Doherty?", Peter reads "The Second Coming" from a library book of Yeats' poetry during an interview in his flat.
In the album Synchronicity, by The Police, two songs allude to "The Second Coming." "Synchronicity I" is about another of Jung's concepts, synchronicity, and its lyrics include the term Spiritus Mundi. The allusion in "Synchronicity II" is less direct, but the song follows a theme similar to "The Second Coming"—a civilization beginning to collapse, and the rise of something new, something perhaps savage, to take its place.
The song "Four Winds" by Bright Eyes contains the phrase "It's the sum of man /Slouching toward Bethlehem" in its chorus.
[edit] Sources
- Lucy McDiarmid, Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden Between the Wars, 1984.
[edit] References
- ^ Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M. (2000). A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917—1950. p.510. Houghton Mifflin.
