Yussouff Poem
Yussouff Poem
Yussouff Poem
The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War.[3] While the
various manuscript revisions of the poem refer to the renaissance, French
Revolutions, the Irish rebellion, and those of Germany and of 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.[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]
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
centres on a diagram composed of two conic helixes ("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).[6] 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" can be read as 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:
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
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.[7] This image points rather to the sinister
figure of Antichrist that precedes the Second Coming of Christ.[8]
The "Spiritus Mundi" (Latin "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 manticore 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.
The Old Woman By Joseph Campbell
AS a white candle
In a holy place,
So is the beauty
Of an agèd face.