Yeats’s “The Second Coming”
This is probably the first rave about a particular poem, but this one by William Butler Yeats really inspired me and interested me. The following is the full text of the poem, followed by an interpretation for an English course that I wrote. Enjoy this supplement to a real rave; I suppose this fits more into a review…
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?William Butler Yeats, 1919
After reading and studying William Butler Yeats’s poem The Second Coming, I can honestly say that no poem covered in my academic career has interested or inspired me as much as this one did. The strong and thought-provoking imagery that Yeats employs in the poem help to convey his deeply disturbing idea of the trends that appear through human existence, and how as one radical new fanaticism fades into obscurity over the centuries, another springs up to replace it that perpetuates the cycle.
Of course, the title The Second Coming is alluding to the Christian mythology of Christ returning in glory to destroy the Antichrist and bring God’s kingdom to mankind. Even the title evokes epic ideas of Jesus, flanked by legions of angels, riding in on sunbeams on a chariot of fire. But Yeats uses this idea to convey a different ideal, one quite divergent from the Christian mythos. He implies that another history-changing series of events, much like the first coming of Jesus and the foundation of Christianity, is on the horizon, a “shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” (ln. 14-15)1 which is currently “slouch[ing] toward Bethlehem to be born” (ln. 22)1.
In his genius, Yeats leaves his description of the nature of the beast to be desired, and allows readers to speculate. A Sphinx crawling through desert sands, heading toward Bethlehem? My initial reaction was to dub the beast “Antichrist,” assuming the poem lived within the realm of Christian mythology. However, I now realize the poem is much more in accordance with my beliefs, saying that time deludes the original fanaticism of a movement and eventually the movement is replaced by something equally influential after centuries.
The lines that strike me as the most epic, and the coolest in my opinion, is when Yeats says, “The darkness drops again; but now I know / That twenty centuries of sleep / Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle” (ln. 18-20)1. The lines tell how the calm overlooking humankind in the years preceding Jesus’ birth were shaken into chaos by the simplest of things: an infant in an innocent cradle. Yeats prophesies that the next world-changer will arrive much the same way.
I really enjoyed reading this poem, and proceeded to buy a collection of Yeats’s poems this weekend in the subsequent Yeats fervor. The poem inspired me enough that I began seriously considering his thesis and finding many examples supporting it across human history. One is only left to wonder what cradle will next rock, and who—or what—will be rocking it?