"The
Se
cond Coming" (1920).
This poem is one of the most widely read and admired in our culture's canon
of
literature. Why? What is it in its dark terror that
speaks
to us as inhabitants of the twentieth century?
There seems to be a deeply ironic reversion of Christian imagery here--a new
"rough beast"
who "[s]louches towards
Bethlehem
to be born." The departure point might be Matthew 24, in which Christ predicts
"the coming of the Son of man" after a disastrous period of warfare and other
tribulations. Within Yeats' personal mythology, the cycles of history reverse
themselves about every
2,000 years. The "widening
gyre"
represents, in most critics' views, the cycle that began with Christ finally
spinning out of control. "
Mere anarchy
is loosed upon the world." (Note: the word "mere" has an archaic meaning--it
used to mean "pure,"
unadulterated, the real
thing. Think of the difference between "pure (unpolluted) snow" and "pure (simple,
dismissable) nonsense"--that's the kind of slippage that "mere" has undergone,
only more thoroughly. During the Renaissance the word clearly had both meanings:
the English would talk about the "mere Irish" and they would be making a double
entendre.) Note that there is also an inversion of the Romantic trope of the
mental journey to someplace else, followed by an enlightened return to reality:
"a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight" and then it disappears
from his line of vision, "The darkness drops again," and leaves him with the
knowledge of the imminent arrival of the "rough beast." Note also the mourning
for the "ceremony of innocence," which "is drowned." What does this mean? I
think it is another illustration of Yeats' belief in the value of manners, courtliness,
aristocratic behavior as manifestations of deeper values. (Compare another poem
that you were not assigned but that's a wonderful poem, "A Prayer for My Daughter":
"How but in custom and ceremony / Are innocence and beauty born?") A note about
the prosody: unfortunately you can't really tell from your book that there is
a stanza break after the line "Are full of passionate intensity." This poem
is not a sonnet, but like a sonnet it has a first statement (the first eight
lines) and a responding statement or amplification (the stanza on p. 90). The
meter is blank verse (with occasional rhymes, for emphasis).
