I have a particular interest in poetry and as a part of this class have been reading quite a bit of war poetry. One of my favorite poets is William Butler Yeats and his poem “The Second Coming,” along with William Blake’s “The Tyger” are among poems that I’ve committed to memory. One of the joys of acquiring a memorized anthology of great poetry is to just be able to “while someone else is eating, opening a window, or just walking dully along “(W. H. Alden) pluck them out of your mind to contemplate the layers of meaning and interlocking complexities. There is no end of that in Yeats……Anyhow, imagine my surprise when my Goggle reader account turned up an article in the New York Times titled What W. B. Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’ Really Says About the Iraq War . According to the Times Editorial author Adam Cohen, “Yeats’s bleakly apocalyptic poem has long been irresistible to pundits. What historical era, after all, is not neatly summed up by his lament that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity?” The poem concludes with terrifying visions of anarchy within a Middle Eastern backdrop over laden with heavy religious symbolism. Cohn claims that “The Second Coming” is fast becoming the official poem of the Iraq war.”
“Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, an especially dismal moment in history. Europeans were shell-shocked from World War I, and deeply cynical. Yeats’s homeland, Ireland, was lurching toward civil war. The old order in Russia had just been toppled by a revolution that Yeats — who had a fondness for aristocracy — feared would spread across the continent and the globe.” The Poem reads as follows:
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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?
One of the aspects of literature we are always considering in our class is connections between authors and their concerns in eras different from our own . There are echoes all over the blogesphere of Yeat’s apocalyptical warnings and his concern with society spiraling out of control, the “Turning and turning in the widening gyre,” is fresh today in contemporary apprehensions about the Iraq war and its impact on our world as it was for Yeats in his. To view this article, please see:
