The Second Coming (poem)

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?

"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 allegorically to describe the atmosphere of post-war Europe.[1] It is considered a major work of modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.[2]

Historical context

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War[3] and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence that followed the Easter Rising, at a time before the British Government decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland. Yeats used the phrase "the second birth" instead of "the Second Coming" in his first drafts.[4]

Influence

Phrases and lines from the poem are used in many works, in a variety of media, such as literature, motion pictures, television and music. Examples of works whose titles draw from "The Second Coming" include: Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart (1958), Joan Didion's essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Robert B. Parker's novel The Widening Gyre (1983), the 1996 non-fiction book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline by Robert Bork, the song "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" by Joni Mitchell from her 1991 album Night Ride Home, in the episode "Revelations" (9 November 1994) of the science fiction television series Babylon 5, the 2003 game Slouching Towards Bedlam, Elyn Saks' autobiography The Center Cannot Hold (2007), and The Sopranos episode "The Second Coming" (2007).

A 2016 analysis by Factiva showed that lines from the poem were quoted more often in the first seven months of 2016 than in any of the preceding 30 years.[5] In the context of political turmoil after the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump's election, commentators repeatedly invoked its lines: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."[6]

References

  1. ↑ Albright, Daniel (1997), Quantum Poetics: Yeats's figures as reflections in Water (PDF), Cambridge University Press, p. 35 .
  2. ↑ Childs, Peter (2007). Modernism. The New Critical Idiom (2nd ed.). Routledge. p. 39. ISBN 978-0‐41541546‐0 Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help).
  3. ↑ Haughey, Jim (2002). The First World War in Irish Poetry. Bucknell University Press. p. 161. ISBN 978‐1‐61148151‐8 Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help).
  4. ↑ Deane, Seamus (1998). "Boredom and Apocalypse". Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790. Clarendon lectures in English literature. Clarendon Press. p. 179. ISBN 978‐0‐19818490‐4 Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help).
  5. ↑ Ballard, Ed (23 August 2016). "Terror, Brexit and U.S. Election Have Made 2016 the Year of Yeats". The Wall Street Journal.
  6. ↑ Kakutani, Michiko (13 February 2017). "A World in Disarray Is a Calm Look at a Chaotic Global Order". The New York Times. Retrieved 15 February 2017. (Review of Richard N. Haass' book.)
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