'The Second Coming Poem' by W. B. Yeats - Important Lines with Contemporary Context.pptx
1. The Second Coming
- William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939)
Paper N/o., Subject Code,
Name : 106 : 22399 : The
Twentieth Century Literature :
1900 to World War II
Topic : ‘The Second Coming’
Poem by W. B. Yeats :
Important Lines with
Explanation
Prepared By : Nirav Amreliya
Batch : 2021-2023 (M.A. Sem. 2)
Enrollment Number : 4069206420210002
Ro. N/o. : 18
Submitted To : Smt. S. B. Gardi Department of English,
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University,
Vidhyanagar, Bhavnagar – 364001
(Dated On : 11th April, 2022)
2. The Second Coming :
• "The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet W. B.
Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920, and
afterwards included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael
Robartes and the Dancer.
• The poem uses Christian imagery regarding
the Apocalypse and Second Coming to allegorically describe the
atmosphere of post-war Europe.
• The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World
War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence in January
1919. The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic:
In the weeks preceding Yeats's writing of the poem, his pregnant
wife Georgie Hyde-Lees caught the virus and was very close to
death.
• The poem has influenced Chinua Achebe’s novel ‘Things Fall Apart’
(1958) and many other major literary writings in English Literary
ocean.
3. • ‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;’
• ‘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.’
• ‘…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,’
Noteworthy Lines :
4. ‘The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold;’
• The bird is not supposed to keep
flying in circles because they have to
come back and land on the falconer’s
glove.
• But W. B Yeats said that the falcon
cannot hear the falconer. And it has a
deep symbolic meaning. He wanted
to say that the human (falcon)
doesn't obey their creator (falconer).
They are moving away from the path
shown by their Creator.
• People only do hypocrisy, do politics
of lies, people kill people together,
commit heresy in the name of
religion. Science has shaken their
faith in God and they compare God
with science.
• The most obvious answer is a deity figure, presumably - given that Yeats
was raised in a Protestant culture - Christ. There is symbolic value in this
comparison since Christ was described as a "shepherd" of men, just as a
Falconer takes charge of a falcon. Also, the symbolism of the Gyre itself
may, in fact, have come from Dante's Divine Comedy where the devil
Geryon moves in "gyres".
• Given, then, that his own thoughts on the subject were an attempt to
impose some rational structure onto a jumble of religious ideas, it is
perhaps better to see the Falconer as something more vague and
5. ‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the
ceremony of innocence is drowned;’
• Dr Elizabeth Outka – An associate professor of English at the
University of Richmond – mentions Yeats’s poem ‘The Second
Coming’ in the sixth chapter ‘Apocalyptic Pandemic’ of her book
‘Viral Modernism’ published in recent year 2019 :
“In November 1918, at the height of the pandemic’s deadly second wave, W. B. Yeats watched
helplessly as his pregnant wife, George, struggled to fight off the virus at their rented house in
Dublin. Outside, the pandemic was sweeping through the city. The countryside where Yeats
thought of taking George offered no escape, already overrun with funerals and bodies. Before it
was over, the flu would infect between 600,000 and 800,000 people in Ireland and kill far more
than were lost in the internal political violence that was also consuming the country. While coming
close to death, George ended up surviving the virus, unlike so many pregnant women at the time.
Just a few weeks later, during his wife’s recovery, Yeats wrote arguably his most famous poem, “The
Second Coming,” one widely read as channeling the zeitgeist of its turbulent moment. The poem is
the only work I’ve considered so far that was not only completed while the pandemic was still
unfolding but written directly after witnessing a near-fatal case. Perhaps for this reason, the
poem offers a different pandemic landscape, one that plunges the reader into the immediacy of a
nightmarish present. While Woolf and Eliot offer flashes of symptoms and the authors in part 1
detail particular cases, they also grant some sense of the body’s aftermath. Yeats, though, brings us
into a violent cataclysm as it unfolds, one that telescopes between an internal, bodily apocalypse
and the vast societal breakdown wreaked by a pandemic-level event.”
6. ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of
passionate intensity.’
• A tide red with blood is released and “loosed” over everything, suggesting massive
violent deaths, as in a war. Not merely water, this tide drowns bodies as well as
innocence itself—it washes away purity. In its wake, wise, good people are reduced
to self-doubt and uncertainty, while the worst of people become passionate and,
presumably, powerful.
• “The fall of one regime does not bring in a utopia. Rather, it opens the way for hard work and long efforts to build
more just social, economic, and political relationships and the eradication of other forms of injustices and
oppression.”
― Gene Sharp, From ‘Dictatorship to Democracy’
7. ‘…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,’
• Yeats wrote in the introduction to his play :
"I began to imagine [around 1904], as always at my left side just out of the
range of sight, a brazen winged beast which I associated with laughing, ecstatic
destruction", noting that the beast was "Afterwards described in my poem 'The
Second Coming".
• However, there are some differences between the two characters, mainly
that the figure in the poem has no wings.
• In other words, the world's trajectory along the gyre of science, democracy,
and heterogeneity is now coming apart, like the frantically widening flight-
path of the falcon that has lost contact with the falconer; the next age will
take its character not from the gyre of science, democracy, and speed, but
from the contrary inner gyre—which, presumably, opposes mysticism, primal
power, and slowness to the science and democracy of the outer gyre. The
“rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem is the symbol of this new age; the
speaker's vision of the rising sphinx is his vision of the character of the new
world.
8. Critical Overview :
• In his A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, A. Norman Jeffares suggests that
“The falcon represents man, represents civilisation, becoming out of touch with Christ, whose
birth was the revelation which marked the beginning of the two thousand years of Christianity.”
However, for Richard Ellmann, as noted in Yeats: The Man and the Masks, the source of the
poem and its meaning lie in the events of the Russian Revolution and its promise to wrest power
from the aristocracy—a promise that to Yeats was a threat, since he favored rule by the elite and
feared the mob or mass rule he associated with popular government, including democracy.
• Two other critics, Donald Davie and Harold Bloom, have suggested that tying the poem to
Christian apocalypse is not as automatic a necessity as the poem itself suggests. Davie remarks
that the Christian apocalypse features not a second but a first coming; in Yeats, Bloom refers to
early drafts of the poem, in which Yeats used the phrase “second birth” instead of “second
coming,” to suggest that Yeats’s word switch was an attempt to tie the poem to a portentous
religious prophecy that is, however, at odds with the rest of the poem. Bloom insists that the
poem is about the second birth not of Christ, but of the sphinx, and that Yeats is above all
attempting to characterize leftist political movements in Ireland as well as in Russia as disastrous
to the ceremony and conviction of the ruling classes.
9. Conclusion :
• In an age of shocking reversals, Yeats’s theory of historical cycles – “day & night, night & day for
ever,” as he once put it – rings true. The only consolation the poem offers is the knowledge that,
for one reason or another, every generation has felt the same apocalyptic shudder that Yeats did
100 years ago. That’s why it is a poem for 1919 and 1939 and 1968 and 1979 and 2001 and
2016 and today and tomorrow. Things fall apart, over and over again, yet the beast never quite
reaches Bethlehem.
• In his definitive edition of Yeats's poems, Richard J. Finneran quotes Yeats's own notes:
“The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is
represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to its
place of greatest contraction... The revelation [that] approaches will... take its character from the
contrary movement of the interior gyre...”
