Created: July 1, 2012 Last Updated: July 2, 2012
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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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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 (1865-1939)
Yeats?s poem, written in 1919, exemplifies the dilemma of the modern world, one in which man has been allowed to discard the principles, the myths, the legends, and the culture which defined his experience and informed his identity in a world he did not create.
Now pressed to create himself, to define his path in a fallen world which still cries out that something is coming, he is left with no knowledge, no wisdom, no legacy, and no authority to explain to him what is happening.
A broad, sometimes comic, yet fully harrowing aspersion of what is to come, Yeats?s dire prediction of a future where ?the centre cannot hold,? where authority and order give way to decay and chaos, contends that the rumblings of modern moral relativism have dire consequences.
At the outset, Yeats presents an unstable and foreboding phenomenon, a ?gyre,? or a circular or spiral form; a vortex, magnified by the dizzying repetition of ?turning and turning.?
?The falcon cannot hear the falconer.? Yeats incorporates medieval imagery in the second line, a trice to the glancing eye, yet inevitably stored with implications. The traditions, the myths of the past, for example, no longer withstand the onslaught of the widening vortex which disrupts and destroys everything in its wake. ?Falcon? incorporated in ?falconer? speaks to the essential identity and relationship of leader and led, yet their connection no longer remains intact.
?Things fall apart??so banal a turn of phrase in contrast to sweeping ocean currents and the romance of the hunt, yet arresting for the fundamental scope of decay which wreaks havoc on order. ?The centre? could refer to commerce, to the focal point of a ministry, the direction of a ship?a ?centre? which accounts for the integrity of the whole, which is not.
Almost a sly joke, ?mere anarchy? implies that the disorder of the modern age is weak in spite of its damage intensity on the world around it. The agent of this anarchy is not identified, perhaps weakening its power, yet also enhancing the forbidding menace of its force.
The ?ceremony of innocence? is a rich phrase, one encapsulating the traditions of men which create a sense of security in a world fraught with doubts and growing questions. Yet in a perverse twist, the ceremony itself is drowned, echoing the religious practice of baptism, losing its value, the essence never resurging.
?The best lack all conviction.? ?Conviction? speaks not just of a confident sense of the truth, but also of the internal mandate that they must do something. They feel no pang about letting the world slip into crude emptiness.
?The worst are full of passionate intensity.? The play on words with ?passionate? evokes a deep irreverence, perhaps conjuring the image of Christ?s ?Passion,? which he endured with intense conviction, whereas now, according to the poet, the ?worst,? the evil elements of the world are now committed, but their commitment is to a heedless, hedonist hatred of all order, a moral relativism which scorns at dying for anything.
The inarticulate nature of the vision illustrates the maddening disturbance of the poet?s fears. Some ?Spiritus Mundi,? a world-spirit, Weltgeist or Zeitgeist.
The poet then glimpses a mirage: ?A shape with lion body and the head of a man? conjures up the tombs of ancient Pharaohs. Yet this ?shape,? indefinite in its mixed description, ?is moving,? with birds flocking around it. Raw power, vain attempts to shade one?s authority, the awesome size and scope of ancient artifacts, have moved many to read the past in order to justify their present circumstances, to enshrine their life and worldview on something which smacks of permanence.
?Darkness drops again,? alludes, perhaps, to the modern age, with its mixing of metaphors, the inability to explain the trials and troubles of a world which has discarded the distinctions of right and wrong, or authority and submission.Without question, Yeats cannot end his dire anti-dirge but with a question, a wandering wondering, which pieces together a narrative from times and deeds immemorial, yet lost through decay and disrespect.
Arthur Christopher Schaper is an author and teacher who lives in Torrance, CA.wor He writes several blogs including Schaper?s Corner.
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