achebe allusions christ demo english gyre inbox inspiration iraq_war irish_civil_war leisure-reading lit literature nytimes poem poems, poetry reading revolution tattoo tfa time, wwi yates yeats

My tags:

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references (ideally, using inline citations). Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2008)

"The Second Coming" is a poem by William Butler Yeats first printed in The Dial (November 1920) and afterwards included in his 1921 verse collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and second coming as allegory to describe the atmosphere in post-war Europe. ^[1] The poem is considered a major work of Modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections including The Norton Anthology of Modernist poetry.^[2]

Contents 1 History 2 Origins of terms 3 References 4 External links

[edit] History

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War.^[3] And while the various manuscript revisions of the poem refer to the French and Irish Revolutions as well as those of Germany and Russia, Richard Ellman and Harold Bloom suggest the text refers to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Bloom argues that Yeats takes the side of the counter-revolutionaries and the poem suggests that reaction to the revolution would come too late by the time the poem is being written in 1919. ^[4] Early drafts also included such lines as: "And there's no Burke to cry aloud no Pitt," and "The good are wavering, while the worst prevail."^[5].

[edit] Origins of terms

The word gyre in the poem's first line may be used in a sense drawn from Yeats's book A Vision, which sets out a theory of history and metaphysics which Yeats claimed to have received from spirits. The theory of history articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram composed of two conical spirals ("gyres"), one situated inside the other, so that the widest part of one cone occupies the same plane as the tip of the other cone, and vice versa. Yeats claimed that this image captured contrary motions inherent within the process of history, and he divided each gyre into different regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual's development). Yeats believed that in 1921 the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic moment, as history reached the end of the outer gyre and began moving along the inner gyre.

The lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" are a paraphrase of one of the most famous passages from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a book which Yeats, by his own admission, regarded from his childhood with religious awe:

In each human heart terror survives

The raven it has gorged: the loftiest fear

All that they would disdain to think were true:

Hypocrisy and custom make their minds

The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.

They dare not devise good for man's estate,

And yet they know not that they do not dare.

In the early drafts of the poem, Yeats used the phrase "the Second Birth", but substituted the phrase "Second Coming" while revising^{[citation needed]}. The Second Coming of Christ referred to in the Biblical Book of Revelation is here described as an approaching dark force with a ghastly and dangerous purpose. Though Yeats's description has nothing in common with the typically envisioned Christian concept of the Second Coming of Christ, as his description of the figure in the poem is nothing at all like the image of Christ, it fits with his view that something strange and heretofore unthinkable would come to succeed Christianity^{[citation needed]}, just as Christ transformed the world upon his appearance.

The "spiritus mundi" (literally "spirit of the world") is a reference to Yeats' belief that each human mind is linked to a single vast intelligence, and that this intelligence causes certain universal symbols to appear in individual minds. Carl Jung's book The Psychology of the Unconscious, published in 1912, could have had an influence, with its idea of the collective unconscious.^{[citation needed]}

The sphinx or sphinx-like beast described in the poem had long captivated Yeats' imagination. He wrote the Introduction to his play The Resurrection, "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.

The phrase "stony sleep" is drawn from the mythology of William Blake. In Blake's poem, Urizen falls, unable to bear the battle in heaven he has provoked. To ward off the fiery wrath of his vengeful brother Eternals, he frames a rocky womb for himself: "But Urizen laid in a stony sleep / Unorganiz'd, rent from Eternity." During this stony sleep, Urizen goes through seven ages of creation-birth as fallen man, until he emerges. This is the man who becomes the Sphinx of Egypt.

[edit] References

• Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven, 2004.

[edit] External links

• Original 'Second Coming' MS on display at National Library of Ireland