Before I start crawling over it with a magnifying glass (and others, I hope, join in) please just read it:
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: 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, 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?
--William Butler Yeats, 1919
Amazing. And now, to the magnifying glass!
With which I can't begin to address, and won't try, the mythic scope of this poem. It's one of the greatest, if not the greatest poem in English of the 20th century. Here is a wonderful illustration of the influence this poem has had on other writers since it was written in 1919.
For me, one of the qualities that make Yeats so powerful is his use of plain language and a conversational tone even as he develops complex and mystical ideas. The speaker in this poem seems to be talking, describing what he sees and how his ideas and vision are changing and deepening as he speaks. He repeats himself, starts and stops, says something one way and then says it another. Look at the repetition of "loosed":
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
And then, as though he thinks, no, let me describe what I see:
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned
(I have never read that line since the second Iraq War, without thinking of this picture:)
The speaker is still musing in the second stanza, and there's a repetition of "surely":
Surely some revelation is at hand
But, on thinking about it, not just some revelation --
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
And saying those words leads him to
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight...
He describes his vision, of the "shape with lion body and head of a man," and then it's gone ("The darkness drops again"). But it leaves him with the certainty of apocalyptic change and the reader learns of it an instant later. The narrative style -- and the setting -- recall the speaker in Shelley's "Ozymandias":
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
Yeats scholars point out that the "widening gyre," or spiral, that the falcon flies at the beginning of the poem seems to represent one of the two cycles which Yeats visualized and
described in his prose work, "A Vision:"
According to the cosmological scheme of A Vision, the sweep of history can be represented by two intersecting cones, or gyres, each of which possesses one of two opposing "tinctures," primary and antithetical, that define the dominant modes of civilization. Yeats associated the primary or solar tincture with democracy, truth, abstraction, goodness, egalitarianism, scientific rationalism, and peace. The contrasting antithetical or lunar tincture he related to aristocracy, hierarchy, art, fiction, evil, particularity, and war. According to Yeats's view, as one gyre widens over a period of two thousand years the other narrows, producing a gradual change in the age. The process then reverses after another twenty centuries have passed, and so on, producing a cyclic pattern throughout time.
(Notice how the disciplined falcon which flies in a spiral while losing contact with his handler has a counterpart at the end in the "indignant" desert birds which "reel" around the rough beast, describing a second spiral.)
I wonder if Yeats thought of those spirals in connection with ancient Celtic art, like that at the passage tombs at Newgrange:
I think it lessens the power of this poem, though, to attach it too closely to anything other than itself. It can't be reduced to the symbols described by Yeats himself in "A Vision," or to the Book of Revelations or Christianity in general, from which it takes some images, or to the dismal state of the world at the time he wrote it. Or to the dismal state of the world now. The rough beast does not equal ISIL, though if the poem were more widely known to American voters it would probably show up in Presidential candidates' ads (Carly Fiorina, probably; her
demon sheep ad team has quite the poetic vision themselves).
Yeats himself wrote in 1900:
It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols that have numberless meanings besides the one or two the writer lays an emphasis upon, or the half-score he knows of, that any highly subjective art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement, into the abundance and depth of Nature. The poet of essences and pure ideas must seek in the half-lights that glimmer from symbol to symbol as if to the ends of the earth, all that the epic and dramatic poet finds of mystery and shadow in the accidental circumstances of life (‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’, E&I 87).
(Sounds Jungian, doesn't he? I thought of that connection on my own, but I definitely wasn't the
first.)
After all, the 20 centuries preceding the rough beast were hardly free of the "aristocracy, hierarchy, art, fiction, evil, particularity, and war" which the rough beast is ushering in, according to the theory described in "A Vision." Note that some of those things aren't inherently bad, either, especially art and fiction. Is the "roughness" of the beast part of its nature, or is it related to the fact that it's in a primitive form? Is its gaze "blank and pitiless" because it's bad, or because it's a force of nature and therefore beyond human emotions like pity? And why is its gaze being compared to the sun anyway, if it's bringing in the lunar cycle?
Yeats was right. Highly subjective art cannot be described or limited by words. This includes poetry, even though poetry, paradoxically, consists entirely of words. Yet it somehow exists beyond them, "in the half-lights that glimmer from symbol to symbol as if to the ends of the earth."
I've read and reread this poem since I was 12, for over 50 years. It sends chills up my spine every time. But they're never the same chills.