Eng426 20th century english literature

“The Second Coming”

Yeats "The Second Coming" (1920):
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 the 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?
Yeats’ poem is about the change that came about at a particular time. The change is a bad one as it is marked with violence and death. The first six lines of the poem show that the poet is painting a picture of anarchy and chaos where everything is not as it was in time past. The imagery of destruction and impending doom could be seen in the words, “the falcon cannot hear the falconer”, “things fall apart the centre cannot hold” and “the blood- rimmed tide is loosed”. The situation that is pictured in these lines shows that there will be death and destruction of lives. The poet in the second stanza alludes to the second coming of Christ in the Bible and that the present situation of doom and chaos the society is experiencing could be the signs of the end - time of the world which Christ’s coming is about to effect or that there might be a change, a salvation through Christ’s coming but the poet is pessimistic about this as the symbol of hope comes in the form of a beast, a creature that has a lion body and the head of a man with a blank gaze that is pitiless as the sun and who slouches to Bethlehem to be changed and reborn.
Yeats’ “The Second Coming” shows the modernists disillusionment about grand narratives and structures like religion, the church, traditional values and truths as none of them were justification for wars and other inhuman disasters. There is no longer a centre or base and though the poet is longing for a replacing structure, there is little or no hope in it.

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