CRITICAL ANALYSIS ON YEATS'S "THE SECOND COMING"

Lydia Morales Ripalda

"I did not think I could live without religion"
W.B. Yeats

In Yeats's views, art would be of little value if it did not represent an order
greater that itself. With the aid of religion (using this word in its broadest sense)
Yeats hoped to locate the secret pattern behind what can be perceived. Since his
father's convincing arguments made formal religions impossible for William B.
Yeats (his father was an atheist), the poet spent a lifetime investigating
alternative ways of spirituality and religious knowledge. His interests ranged
over Theosophy, astrology, Neoplatonism, spiritualism, the magical and
Cabbalistic traditions, Hermetic philosophy, the work of Swendenborg, Bochme
and Blake, and sacred books of all creeds. These things were for Yeats both
emotionally satisfying and poetically useful because many of his best poems are
related to the spiritual system built by the poet on the elements above
mentioned.

Among this group of poems is the famous "The Second Coming" written in
January 1919 and published in 1921 together with eleven poems more in a
volume entitled Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Most of the poems of this book
fall into two very clear groups: a set of them are based on the Easter 1916 Rising
and the subsequent troubles, and another set explore aspects of Yeats's spiritual
system. As John Unterecker points out, the actual structure of the book,
however, juggles the poems on these two subjects into a carefully arranged
pattern "which was intended to reflect what Yeats saw as a developing personal
maturity in a time of national and international crisis. Private happiness grew,
but that happiness caused insight into impending social chaos" 1. This personal
joy set against a background of irrational destructive violence drives Yeats into
postures of prophecy, clearly exemplified in "The Second Coming".

"The Second Coming" is the most vivid record of momentary prophetic insight
that Yeats left us. Unterecker says that perhaps because these stanzas rely "on
what Maud Bodkin and Jung would define as an archetypal pattern, their
horror vision of the destruction of the familiar world seems infinitely
meaningful"2. This terrifying poem prophesies the arrival of a new kind of god,
and takes its title from Christian doctrine. It is related firstly to Christ's
prediction of the Second Coming after anarchy and a number of horrors:

There will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the
beginning of the world until now and never will be. And if
those days had not been shortened, no human being would be
saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.
Then if any one says to you, "Lo, here is the Christ!" or "There
he is" do not believe it. For false Christs and false prophets will
arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray if
possible, even the elect. (Matthew, 24: 21-24)3

and secondly to St John's description of the beast of the Apocalypse, the

Antichrist, in Revelation:

(...) and when they have finished their testimony, the beast that
ascends from the bottomless pit will make war upon them and
conquer them and kill them. (Rev, 11:7)

(...) authority was given to the beast over every tribe and people
and tongue and nation, and all who dwell on earth will worship
it, every one whose name has not been written before the
foundation of the world in the book of life of the lamb that was
slain. (Rev, 13:7-8)4

Yeats adds horror to the idea of the rough beast by making it be born near
Bethlehem, a place associated in Western minds with "the innocence of infancy
and the whole new gospel of forgiveness and mercy preached by Christ" as
Norman Jeffares says5. But in spite of these Christian connections, the meaning
of "The Second Coming" depends entirely upon Yeats's personal ideas, his theory
of history, his imagery of the gyres and his use of memories of pictures. The
poem is, in fact, the apogee of Yeats's interest in historical change and conveys
the terror of a coming antithetical civilization. It creates its effect by its images,
by the announcement of anarchy, by horror at the overcoming of innocence,
and "by its slow, remorseless revelation of the nature of what is to come: the
image, gradually glimpsed, is finally appreciated for all its brutality; it is
slouching towards Bethlehem, the traditional holy place of Christian worship,
to be born"6. The meaning of this image, the new Bethlehemian god, is clear: the
two-thousand-year Christian cycle is going to be destroyed and a new anti-
civilization is going to be born after a delivery marked by the inversion of
values.

Built up climactically, the poem develops a continuous tension. Its structure can
be divided into three parts: description, from line 1 to line 8; vision or
revelation, from line 9 to line 17; and evaluation, from line 18 to the end.

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?

In the first part of the poem what Yeats describes is not an actual landscape but
a metaphoric and symbolic one. As George Bornstein explains "we do not feel
that a falcon flies off before his eyes any more than that he literally sees a blood-
dimmed tide. Instead, he depicts the state of the world as if from the top of a
mile-high tower"7. In this sense, the opening lines are a great evocation of visual
response, the force of the -ing endings in the first line strengthening the idea of
continuous movement, which is basic in the poem. The repetition of "turning
and turning" is half-echoed by the "falcon" / "falconer" repetition in line two.
Then the image is expanded and generalised, and as Norman Jeffares points out
"centrifugal force is generated" 8 with the line "Things fall apart: the centre
cannot hold". Tension develops with the effort of the centre in trying to hold
these things falling apart and with the image of anarchy loosing upon the world
(line 4). The verb "to loose" is repeated and intensified with the image of the
flooding tide in line 5. And the adjective "blood-dimmed" strengthens the
terrible situation and, in Jeffares's view, even "may suggest the archetypal myth
of floods destroying all life upon the world" 9. The effect of this flood is the
drowning of innocence (line 6) and it is connected with the lack of conviction of
the best mentioned in line 8.

What is the meaning of this? According to Yeats's philosophy on historical

evolution (explained in his book A Vision), history is a wheel always turning,
and every revolution of that wheel is a historical cycle. Every cycle should take
about two thousand years and should end in chaos which makes way for a new
cycle. With the birth of the new period the whole process should begin again.
Yeats dates the beginning of our phase with the birth of Christ, so the time for
its final chaos, the bloodshed and the reversion of values should be the final
decades of this cycle, that is, at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of
the 21st century. This Great Wheel of History is constituted by the pattern of
two interpenetrating gyres symbolizing an abstract idea of two movements,
"one towards perfect self-realization, the other towards perfect self-
abnegation"10, one towards subjectivity, the other towards objectivity. In a note
to the Cuala Press edition of Michael Robartes and the Dancer, Yeats describes in
detail this historical process as it is symbolized in his double gyre:

(...) 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
that of its greatest contraction. At the present moment the life
gyre is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ
which was narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest
 expansion. The revelation which approaches will however take
its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre.
All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, homogenized
civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the
continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash,
tough in a flash that will not strike only in one place, and will
for a time be constantly repeated, of the civilization that must
slowly take its place (...) And when the revelation comes it will
not come to the poor but to the great and learned and establish
again for two thousand years prince and vizier.11

So in this part what Yeats is describing in a metaphorical way is the beginning

of the end of our phase with all its violence and evil. The widening gyre in line
one is clearly the outward gyre of our age coming to its end. The falconer are
those cornerstones (Christian values, reason, technical progress, a certain idea
of power, politics and law...) which have exerted rule or authority over the
falcon (humanity, nature, intuition, society...) during the last two thousand
years. But now the falcon is lost in the outward gyre describing such a wide
circle around its falconer that it doesn't listen to him, so a crisis of authority
takes place. Bloodshed and pain can be caused both by "the worst full of
passionate intensity" who try to take advantage of the confusion of the moment,
and by some of the old falconers who try to reassert their authority.

It is in the contemplation of this view that the revelation comes. That is the
second part of the poem starting at the beginning of the second stanza. In line 9,
the poet is intuitively sure of the existence of some revelation connected with all
the events of this "perne of time". He thinks that the Second Coming, that is, the
new historical cycle, is at hand (line 10). And just after pronouncing these
words the insight comes: "a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi" (line 12). This
Spiritus Mundi (or Great Memory) was described by Yeats in Per Amica Silentia
Lunae, an essay in which he explained his own practice of symbolic meditation:

Before the mind's eye, whether in sleep or walking, came

images that one was to discover presently in some book one
had never read, and after looking in vain for explanation to the
current theory of forgotten personal memory, I came to believe
 in a Great Memory passing from generation to generation. But
that was not enough, for these images showed intention and
choice (...). The thought was again and again before me that this
study had created a contact or mingling with minds who had
followed a like study in some other age (...). Our daily thought
was certainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast
luminous sea.12

The Spiritus Mundi is, in short, "a general storehouse of images which have
ceased to be a property of any personality or spirit" 13. Norman Jeffares points
out that similar images of the rough beast in the poem (which resembles the
Egyptian Sphinx) can be found in the symbolism of the magician, occultist,
Golden Dawn member and Yeats's friend, MacGregor Mathers; in illustrations
and drawings by Blake and his friends Charles Ricketts and Sturge Moore; in
the Book of Ezekiel; and in Shakespeare's Lucrece14. Using an image with a
human head and a lion's body, and assigning it a pitiless, blank gaze (lines 14-
15), Yeats lets his beast slouch towards the seat of the dogmatic, levelling,
unifying Peterian and Paulian Christian era which is doomed to die. The effect
of the description of the beast is one of cumulative pressure: the movement of
the poem becomes steady, insistent, more emotive, and its sound becomes
largely dominated by the beat of single syllables (sands, shape, lion, head, man,
gaze, blank, run, slow, thighs, shadow, reel, birds...). As Bornstein says, because
the image of the beast seen in the mind's eye comes from Spiritus Mundi, "Yeats
doesn't have to recall it personally; consequently, he can increase urgency by
writing in the present tense"15. The passionate tone of the revelation causes a
displacement only in space ("somewhere in the sands of the desert", line 13), but
not in time. A here-there-here movement matches the out-in-out structure. This
vision of the antithetical beast heralding the end of primary (=objective)
Christianity replaces the erratic falcon of the first part with birds once again
wheeling in formation.

With the end of the vision in line 17, the poet's return to himself completes the
doubling action built into the poem by the paired birds, the title itself and the
repeated phrases "turning", "surely", "is loosed" and "is at hand". The vision
leaves the poet in a state of partial illumination. However, after reverting to his
original state ("The darkness drops again", line 18), the poet has grown in
knowledge but not in power. He can do nothing, so there is a certain sense of
fatalism in the poem: the learned can reach the knowledge of the things to
come, but only the powerful can act over them. Anyway, now the poet realizes
how dramatically Christ's coming and the rise of Christianity (the "rocking
cradle" of line 20) reversed the previous historical period (the "twenty centuries
of stony sleep" of line 19), and then returns to the idea of the beast to ask what
the future holds in the new antithetical cycle. Yeats creates a sense of horror
referred indirectly in the earlier lines (where even the savage desert birds were
indignant at the beast's coming), consequence now of the realization of the fact
that a new nightmarish coming is at hand. This means not just that the gyres are
reciprocal −"living each other's life and dying each other's death" 16−, but that
the new god appears terrible because seen through the mental set of Christian
civilization and its derivatives. The final question in lines 21-22 is genuine, not
rhetorical. In Yeats's system it is sure that something is coming, but we do not
know what, nor can we, because we are bound by the old civilization. Surely it
will be something dramatic for our world in the same way that Christianity was
dramatic for the old pagan age, but it is impossible to know precisely. The
ultimate horror of the poem −the desecration of the holy place of Bethlehem−
comes carried by the culminating intensification of the meaning of the verbs
("reel", "vexed", and the keyword of the poem's strength, "slouches"). As Jeffares
says, this is "probably Yeats's most poweful poem" 17. Its effect is cumulative: it
states a situation and envisages its development. And speaking about its
essence, the poem is at the same time dramatic, philosophic, lyric, religious and
elegiac.

The central irony in Yeats's historical system is that chaos must become a
pattern of consummate order and the poet assumes it. Although "The Second
Coming" has Christian echoes even in its title, the real truth is that Yeats's view
of history is radically opposed to that of the Christian scheme. The meaningful
and finite span of history culminated with the Second Coming of Christ and the
Doomsday is substituted in the Yeatsian system by the endless and meaningless
succession of cycles. The second coming could be just the -nth, and it is in fact
the third implied by the poem. The wit of Yeats's allusion lies in using a
metaphor from one of the great Christian achievements of order to describe a
disorder inaugurating a new historical phase which will reverse that of
Christian civilization itself.

Just to finish I will make some comments on formal aspects of the poem. It is
interesting to remark that the syntax of "The Second Coming" is a good example
of what Ralph H. Earle called "the topology of passion" 18: it structures the poetic
surface by positioning words and images to generate passionate effects. In this
sense, the syntax in the first stanza of the poem is based on the juxtaposition of
short sentences. This formal device gives an impressionist tone and a quick
rhythm to this part. The compression of construction is the key for speed and
fluidity. Two enjambments (in lines 5/6 and 7/8) alter the balance between the
prosodic unit −the line− and the syntactic unit. The subsequent rhythmic
tension heightens the dramatic effect of the drowning of innocence by the
blood-dimmed tide, and of the passionate intensity of the worst.

After two lines with a parallelism in construction which introduce the

revelation, the vision comes in a long sentence. As Earle explains, "Yeats's
syntactic strategies operate principally on the level of the sentence, affecting the
order of major clausal and phrasal units. These strategies include the devices
known as parataxis, hypotaxis, parallelism, and transposition. In addition Yeats
frequently uses a number of more specific devices that cannot easily be
categorized. One of these is the absolute construction, rare in the language as a
whole, which occurs in some of his most memorable poems such as "The Second
Coming"19.

As it is said above, the vision is explained in a long sentence of forty-one words.

In Earle's view, "Yeats's unique contribution lies in his great syntactic virtuosity,
so that although his syntax remains within the bounds of the acceptable, it
achieves an uncommonly wide variety of effects. Perhaps the most striking
feature of Yeats's syntax is his unusually long sentences" 20. Yeats's is precisely a
master in this: his long sentences create a complex textual framework for the
interplay of Yeats's other syntactic devices, providing room for the
manipulation in the order of words and clauses, that is his personal mark in
syntactic practice. Of course, Yeats did not use long sentences exclusively: much
of the effectiveness rests in the contrast between statements and long sentences
in which Yeats amply displays his virtuosity. In "The Second Coming" this
contrast can be seen between the first part of the poem and the narration of the
vision. This long sentence is a good example of Yeats's mastery in the ranking of
ideas. In order to make possible a movement out, a spatial separation between
the speaker and the location of the vision, Yeats alters the usual order in the
sentence putting the place complement ("somewhere in sands of the desert")
before the long double subject ("a shape...", "a gaze..." referred to the beast)
which covers lines 14 and 15, and the verb with its direct object placed in line
16. The subordinate clause "while..." in lines 16 and 17 is a good example of
complete transposition: the subject ("shadows of...") is at the end of the clause,
the verb just in the middle ("reel") and the complement at the beginning ("all
about it"). There is a syntactic parallelism between the two clauses in this long
sentence: the place complements are places firstly and at the end of the previous
line; this gives a sort balance to the whole sentence.

The third part of the poem, that of evaluation (lines 18-22), is based syntactically
on the use of what Earle calls 'the absolute', a device to achieve speed and
fluidity. Earle points out (in line 21) that "although the possessive 'its' connects
beast and hour into the same image, to say that it acts as a relative pronoun
would be to violate the norms of acceptable syntax. It is easier to consider "its
hour" an isolated noun phrase modified by the compressed participial phrase
"come round at last"; the phrase fulfills the definition of the absolute
construction and maintains syntactic decorum" 21. That is, to use "its hour come
round at last" rather than the relative clause "whose hour come round at last"
gives compression, while the intrusion of the absolute maintains dramatic
suspense until the final line.

The poem ends with a question, one of the most broadly used devices in Yeats's
poetry. Why? Lee Zimmerman suggests two important reasons: first, questions
stress the personal element in a poem, and second, they call attention to the
presence of a speaker22. Earle considers a further important aspect: that
questions are not specifically marked by time, so the exchange of information
required occurs in the present moment 23. The final question in "The Second
Coming", in fact, reinforces the sense of present time in the coming of the beast
and also makes stronger the closing. The reader's resistance to persuasion is
lowered because the poet's argument approaches indirectly in question form,
rather than straight. But at the same time the argument is stronger because the
facts are so obvious that the question has a clear answer. The closing question
creates that persuasive effect.
1
NOTES

Unterecker, John, A Reader's Guide to W.B. Yeats (London: Thomas & Hudson, 1959), p.157.
2
Unterecker (1959), p.164.
3
The Oxford Anotated Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 1204.
4
The Oxford Anotated Bible (1962), p. 1500 & 1502.
5
Jeffares, Norman, Profiles in Literature: W.B. Yeats (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), p.37.
6
Jeffares, Norman, W.B. Yeats: The Poems (London: E. Arnold, 1979), p.39.
7
Bornstein, George, Poetic remaking: the Art of Browning, Yeats and Pound (University Park and London: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), p.63.
8
Jeffares (1979), p.39.
9
Jeffares (1979), p.40.
10
Stock, A.G., W.B. Yeats: His Poetry and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), p.122-123.
11
Unterecker (1959): p. 165-166.
12
Yeats, W.B., Mythologies (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. 345-346.
13
Jeffares (1971), p.37.
14
Jeffares (1971), p.38.
15
Bornstein (1988), p.64.
16
Yeats quoted in Bornstein (1988), p.64.
17
Jeffares (1979), p.41.
18
Earle, Ralph, "Questions of Syntax, Syntax of Questions: Yeats and the Topology of Passion", Yeats, An Annual
of Critical and Textual Studies, Vol. VI (Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), p.19.
19
Earle (1988), p.21.
20
Earle (1988), p.20.
21
Earle (1988), p.33.
22
Zimmerman, Lee, "Singing Amid Uncertainty: Yeats's Closing Questions", Yeats, An Annual of Critical and
Textual Studies, Vol. II (Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), p.37.
23
Earle (1988), p.42.