The widening gyre

Among my personal favorite poems of the twentieth century, The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats has inspired countless interpretations and even provided titles to a number of works whose subject matter ranges from novels about European imperialism in Africa to hip-hop albums. Aside from the apparent quotability of his lines, the poem has also inspired a good deal of interpretation and academic study from those aiming to decipher some of Yeats’s cryptic symbolism. The phrase “second coming” evokes a wealth of Christian imagery, as it is colloquially associated with the return of Jesus of Nazareth,¹ the human incarnation of Judeo-Christianity’s central deity. Is Yeats speaking of the same figure, Jesus, directly—removing the need for much interpretation—or is the “rough beast” which “slouches toward Bethlehem”² something altogether different, something related to but not identical to the Christian savior? In The Second Coming, Yeats actually refers to the first appearance of Jesus as one in an ongoing cycle of paradigm shifts, and tells us that, “twenty centuries” after the Nazarene’s appearance, the “hour [has] come round at last” for the next significant alteration in human history “to be born.”²

In his first stanza, Yeats discusses in cryptic imagery a “widening gyre” and a “falcon [who] cannot hear the falconer.”² In these famous opening lines he seems to address a movement whose initially great influence has faded over time, a movement whose original force has dissolved and whose original leaders have ultimately lost control. From within the stance that the entire poem has to do with the coming of Jesus of Nazareth, a cynic would argue that he here references the Catholic Church, and that the “widening gyre” refers to their expanding scope of influence; that the falconer would represent the Magisterium of power in the Church and the falcon its message, lost among the masses who alternatively “lack all conviction” or are “full of passionate intensity.”[yeats] However, I believe the real meaning is not so simple. Yeats here views Christianity as one paradigm shift among others, and that the order of Christendom’s power as a legal and moral force in the world was simply an aftereffect of this paradigm shift not necessarily tied to any objective divine right. While it would appear that the collapse of such a moral authority could allow for “mere anarchy [to be] loosed upon the world,”², I believe that Yeats intended this poem to apply to any significant world-changing event throughout history, and the fact that Christianity maps so cleanly onto his lines and symbols is purely a symptom of our minds’ saturation in Christian culture. The next paradigm shift, which according to Yeats is due soon, would supplant all these cultural structures with profoundly different ones, and it stands to reason that these lines would be just as easily mapped onto whichever influential movement replaces Jesus.

“Surely,” writes Yeats at the beginning of his next stanza, “some [new] revelation is at hand.”² Millions of Christians suspected that at the turn of the millennium, Jesus would return to do battle with the prophesied Antichrist and initiate the narrative in the Book of Revelations. Regardless of whether such events transpired, Yeats, too, had suspicions about what might follow “twenty centuries of stony sleep.”² His prediction, collected from the mysterious collective subconscious he terms Spiritus Mundi—or spirit of the world—resembles a frightful sphinx “slouch[ing] toward Bethlehem,”², famous for being Jesus’s purported birthplace. While this and a later line mentioning a “rocking cradle”² seem to rather forcefully suggest Jesus is the subject of the poem, it should be noted that these, too, could apply to any number of imagined world-changing figures or events. The fact that Yeats mentions his idea “Spiritus Mundi” suggests that these appearances or world-altering paradigm shifts are universal among humans, that we share visions and understandings of them in our Jungian collective subconscious. Here, almost most of all, Yeats distances his vision from the specificity of a Christian worldview and purports the universality of these “comings,” that people of every creed and time can appreciate their influence.

The line that most pins the poem to the appearance of Jesus is where Yeats mentions “twenty centuries” since the last “coming” transpired.² While this certainly points at Jesus for contemporary man due to the non-coincidental proximity of dates—since the poem was written 1,890 years after Jesus reportedly began his ministry when he was 30 years old—I maintain that the poem can apply to any number of significant paradigm shifts that might have already happened or are yet to. These are the sort of events we count years by, events from which all our understanding of the world’s operation are derived. Twenty centuries preceding the appearance of the Christian savior are called “stony sleep,” and Yeats alleges that they were “vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,” most likely a reference to the birth of Jesus.² However, this passage in particular raises a couple of questions. What happened twenty centuries before Jesus, somewhere around 2000 b.c.e.? Was there, perhaps, another significant shift of human experience from which the cradle ejected us? And what of this new beast, the sphinx Yeats reports is dragging its way to Bethlehem—is it altogether different from the innocent and unassuming child which, when welcomed into the world, harkened in this most recent age?

While it cannot be argued that the poem is inherently tied to and indivisible from Christian tradition and an understanding of the Christian mythos, it should also be noted that nowhere within its terse stanzas does a direct reference to Jesus arise. For this reason alone, the poem is applicable to any significant harbinger of the new age which might yet arrive, and that its various components could just as easily be mapped to something new as they are to the figure and history of Jesus. Perhaps, following some world-altering calamity that either has or hasn’t yet transpired, future readers will look upon this poem and laugh at the notion that it could have applied to anything other than their predicament. As Christianity loses steam, as its adherents devolve into those of “passionate intensity,”² a new beast will rock the cradle that names the ages, and the world might be forever altered for a second time around the cycle. I am reminded that, even generations after Jesus’ death as his new religion was taking hold, some within the Roman Empire didn’t even know he’d existed at all. What did Yeats predict, what hides even today in the darkest reaches of our civilization which, twenty centuries from now, will have reshaped the world?