Paper no : 106
Assignment : Paper no :106
The Twentieth century literature: 1900 to world War II.
∆ Personal Information:
Name : Maya Batiya
Roll no : 18
Enrollment no :5108230003
Course : M.A.sem-2
Paper no :106
Paper code :22399
Paper name : The Twentieth century literature: 1900 to world War II.
Topic : Critical Analysis “The Second Coming”.
Submitted : Smt.S.B.Gardi, Department of English MKBU.
Email:mayajbatiya2003@gmail.com
Q. Critical Analysis “ The Second Coming”
∆ Introduction:
The Poem “The Second Coming” is composed by an Irish poet, ‘William Butler Yeats’, Who was known as one of the greatest dramatists, prose writers, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century English Literature. The poem was written in 1919 and published in 1920. Yeats won several Literary Prizes in his literary career including Nobel Prize in 1923. He was much inspired by William Wordsworth, William Blake, John Keats, and many other poets of the Puritan age and Romantic age. The theme of his poem is – love, war nature, humanity, and relationship as well.
∆ About W. B. Yeats:
William Butler Yeats (born June 13, 1865, Sandymount, Dublin, Ireland—died January 28, 1939, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France) was an Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer, one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
Yeats’s father, John Butler Yeats, was a barrister who eventually became a portrait painter. His mother, formerly Susan Pollexfen, was the daughter of a prosperous merchant in Sligo, in western Ireland. Through both parents Yeats (pronounced “Yates”) claimed kinship with various Anglo-Irish Protestant families who are mentioned in his work. Normally, Yeats would have been expected to identify with his Protestant tradition—which represented a powerful minority among Ireland’s predominantly Roman Catholic population—but he did not. Indeed, he was separated from both historical traditions available to him in Ireland—from the Roman Catholics, because he could not share their faith, and from the Protestants, because he felt repelled by their concern for material success. Yeats’s best hope, he felt, was to cultivate a tradition more profound than either the Catholic or the Protestant—the tradition of a hidden Ireland that existed largely in the anthropological evidence of its surviving customs, beliefs, and holy places, more pagan than Christian.
∆ Notable Works :
• The Land of Heart's Desire (1894),
• Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902),
• Deirdre (1907),
•The Wild Swans at Coole (1919),
•The Tower (1928)
• Last Poems and Plays (1940).
∆Historical Background:
W.B. Yeats was an Irish poet born on the 13th of June, 1865. He is considered a largely Irish poet, although he ran in British literary circles as well, and he was a big part of the resurgence of Irish literature. In 1923, he was to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for his poetry, as the first Irishman. This was shortly after Ireland had finally gained independence from England.
∆ Significance Of The Title :
The title of the poem, “The Second Coming” has a thematic significance. The poem’s title refers to the second coming or the return of Jesus Christ in order to save humanity. The speaker of the poem describes the chaotic situation in the world and hopes for the second coming.
∆ Analysis Of “ The Second Coming” :
The present poem “The Second Coming” is one of the most successful poems of W. B. Yeats. It is a non-rhyming poem. It is a poem of twenty-two lines expressing the opinion of the second incarnation. In the first stanza of the poem, the poet explains the state of complete disorder in Ireland. The poet says that time passes very fast and the wheel of time also moves fast. It changes rapidly. The poet further says that the falcon does not hear the falconer. Here falcon is a small bird of prey and the falconer is a trainer of the bird who trains the falcon in the art of preying or who gives the training of preying to the falcon. But now the falcon is not in the control of the trainer.
Here poet wants to say that the situation is out of control in Ireland. There is a state of anarchy everywhere in the country. Thus, it is a state of complete disorder. People do not respect laws and rules. Innocent and weak people are destroyed and killed while evil or wicked are worshipped. The good people are losing their faith and confidence while bad people are growing very fast. The poet says that evil people are being stronger and virtuous people are being weaker in the state of disorder in the country. Here the poet tries to show the time of the twentieth century in Ireland. Thus the poet presents the age here in an impressive way.
‘The Second Coming’ was William Butler Yeats’ ode to the era. Rife with Christian imagery, and pulling much inspiration from apocalyptic writing, Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’ tries to put into words what countless people of the time felt: that it was the end of the world as they knew it and that nothing else would ever be the same again.
The First World War had shaken the foundations of knowledge for many, and scarred from the knowledge of the ‘war to end all wars’, they could no longer reconcile themselves with a time before the Great War. This poem is the literary version of that: a lack of ability to think of a time before the war.
“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.”
Much has been written on the apocalypse, and many of those writings focus on the harbingers of the event: it is always bloody and massive, a vicious explosion that shakes the world to its foundation. In Yeats’ poem, the apocalypse is a much quieter, more understated, affair. It opens up with the disturbance of nature.
‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer’.
Falcons were used as hunting animals since the medieval era. They are incredibly smart, and dedicated to their trainers, responding immediately to any noise that their handler makes, thus for the falcon to have flown so rapidly out of the reach of the falconer shows us how the delicate balance of the world has been upset. It’s a particularly Shakespearian tactic to reflect evil in the way that nature behaves. In Macbeth, when the villainous Macbeth murders the good king, a lowly porter recognizes that the horses have started to eat each other and that there was a great and thunderous storm. This is the same manipulation of imagery, using the innocent vision of nature to imply a great warping in the fabric of things as they should have been. We see it throughout the first stanza: Yeats’ words take on an edge of doomed and destroyed innocence (‘things fall apart, the center cannot hold’). The very world as he knew it – here no doubt represented in the immediate world as Yeats knew it, which was Europe – has started to crumble. The Great War is still fresh on his mind, and the phrase ‘the centre cannot hold’ can also represent the battles that were fought in France, battles that left the country scarred beyond repair, and struggling in the aftermath of the war. ‘Blood-dimmed tide’, also, can reference the same war, but aside from the historical link, there is again that idea of nature warped by man – blood-dimmed tide, water corrupted by spilled blood, by war, by an encroaching and violent end.
“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 around 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 second stanza, the Biblical imagery takes over the visions of corrupted nature. From the start, Yeats ties his poem to religion by stating ‘the Second Coming is at hand’, and conjuring up a picture of a creature with a lion’s body and a man’s head, much like the sphynx, and a gaze as ‘blank and pitiless as the sun’. By comparing it to the very nature that Yeats spoke about in the first part of the poem, he brings out the almost infallible quality of this beast: like nature, it feels nothing for the suffering of man. It is and will be when man has turned to ash and dust in its weak.
It is worth noting that Yeats believed that poets were privy to spiritual ‘after images’ of symbols and memories recurring in history, and especially available to souls of a sensitive nature such as poets. Here, the Spiritus Mundi is the soul of the Universe, rattling in the wake of the coming apocalypse, delivering to Yeats the image of the beast that will destroy the world, and him with it. The beast will come, Yeats is assured of this, but not yet; by the end of the poem, the veil has dropped again, the monster is no longer, and Yeats writes that ‘twenty centuries of stony sleep / were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle’, implying that whatever is coming for the world, whatever monster, will be here soon. It is not yet born, but the world is right for it, and waiting for it, and Yeats is certain that the rough beast ‘its hour come round at last’ is only a few years away from wracking the world into a state of complete destruction.
∆ Themes in the poem “The Second Coming”
1.Civilization, Chaos and Control:
“The Second Coming” presents a nightmarish apocalyptic scenario, as the speaker describes human beings’ increasing loss of control and tendency towards violence and anarchy.
“The Second Coming” actually has a simple message: it basically predicts that time is up for humanity, and that civilization as we know it is about to be undone. Yeats wrote this poem rightafter World War I, a global catastrophe that killed millions of people.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising,then, that the poem paints a bleak picture of humanity, suggesting that civilization’s sense of progress and order is only an illusion.The “falconer,” representing humanity’s attempt to control its world, has lost its “falcon”in the turning “gyre” (the gyre is an image Yeats uses to symbolize grand, sweeping historical movements
as a kind of spiral). These lines also suggest how the modern world has distanced people from nature (represented here by the falcon) and it’s clear that whatever connection between falcon andfalconer has broken, and now the human world is spiralling into chaos.Indeed, the poem suggests that though humanity might have looked like it was making progress over the past “twenty centuries” through ever -increasing knowledge and scientific developments,the First World War proved people to be as capable of self- destruction as ever. The “best” peoplelack “conviction,” they're not bothering to do anything about this nightmarish reality, while the“worst” people seem excited and eager for destruction. The current state of the world, according tothe speaker, proves that the "centre"that is, the foundation of society was never very strong.In other words, humanity’s supposed arc of progress has been an illusion . Whether the poem meansthat humanity has lost its way or never knew it to begin with is unclear, but either way the promisesof modern society of safety, security, and human dignity have proven empty. And in their place,a horrific creature has emerged.This Second Coming is clearly not Jesus, but instead a “rough beast” that humanity itself has woken up by this incessant noise of its many wars. With this final image of the beast, the poem indicates that while humanity seemed to get morecivilized in the 2,000 years that followed Christ's birth, in reality people have been sowing the seeds of their own destruction all along. This “rough beast” is now “pitilessly” slouching toward the birthplace of Jesus likely in order to usher in a new age of “darkness” and “nightmare.”
2. Mysticism and the Occult:
Yeats had a deep fascination with mysticism and the occult, and his poetry is infused with a sense of the otherworldly, the spiritual, and the unknown. Mysticism figures prominently in Yeats’s discussion of the reincarnation of the soul, as well as in his philosophical model of the conicalrejectionof Christian principles in favor of a more supernatural approach to spirituality creates a unique
flavor in Yeats’s poetry that impacts his discussion of history, politics, and love.
3.The Impact of Fate and the Divine on History:
Yeats’s devotion to mysticism led to the development of a unique spiritual and philosophical system that emphasized the role of fate and historical determinism, or the belief that events have been preordained. Yeats had rejected Christianity early in his life, but his lifelong study ofmythology, Theosophy, spiritualism, philosophy, and the occult demonstrate his profound interestin the divine and how it interacts with humanity. Over the course of his life, he created a complexsystem of spirituality, using the image of interlocking gyres (similar to spiral cones) to map out thedevelopment and reincarnation of the soul. Yeats believed that history was determined by fate andthat fate revealed its plan in moments when the human and divine interact. A Tone of historicallydetermined inevitability permeates his poems, particularly in descriptions of situations of humanand divine interaction.
∆ Symbols in the Poem “The Second Coming”
1.Falcon:
Yeats places the falcon at the center which represents humanity's control over the world. The fact thatthe falcon "cannot hear" its master thus symbolizes a loss of that control.To understand this symbol better, it's important to know a little bit about falconry more generally.Falconry is a practice that goes back thousands of years, and involves people training birds of prey tofollow instructions. This was often for hunting purposes, but is also practiced as a kind of art form. In both instances, the falcon represents humanity exerting a type of intelligent control over the naturalworld. Killer birds like hawks and falcons are brought under the spell of humans.The falcon's inability to hear the falconer’s calls means that the relationship between them has been cutoff. This symbolizes chaos and confusion, and specifically gestures towards a breakdown incommunication.
2.The Falconer:
The speaker speaks of a world which is losing touch with the order and morality. Violence isdestroying the innocent and the people who believed in goodness are being silenced. The falcon whichseparated from the falconer represents humanity itself which has become detached from God or frommorality and order.The falconer represents God or the traditional values, ethical responsibility and order that was oncecontrolled the falcon. The second coming, whatever exactly it may be it describes the state of humanity
that has shattered the falconer’s (ruler) contact with the falcon (ruled) leaving both stranded ad alone.
3.The Beast:
In “The Second Coming,” the great beast emerges from the Spiritus Mundi, or soul of the universe, to function as the primary image of destruction in the poem. The speaker predicts the arrival of the Second Coming, and this prediction summons a “vast image” of a frightening monster pulled from the collective consciousness of the world. The speaker has a vision of a beast. The beast has a "lion body"and the "head of a man." This makes it similar to a sphinx which was a mythical creatures said to begreedy towards humans. With its animal body and human head, perhaps this beast says somethingabout the "nightmare" to come. Though humans have tried to civilize themselves and improve theirworld, perhaps their more beastly animal nature has only been hidden — not defeated.The beast might symbolize that civilization itself is a kind of illusion. The human head has a "gaze"that lacks empathy, suggesting that the beast is ready to kill. This strange image seems to gesturetowards humankind's ever-improving capacity for self-destruction.
3. The Gyre :
The gyre, a circular or conical shape, appears frequently in Yeats’s poems and was developed as part of the philosophical system outlined in his book A Vision. He chose the image of interlocking gyres— visually represented as two intersecting conical spirals— to symbolize his philosophical belief that allthings could be described in terms of cycles and patterns. The soul (or the civilization, the age, and soon) would move from the smallest point of the spiral to the largest before moving along to the othergyre. Although this is a difficult concept to grasp abstractly, the image makes sense of a particularhistorical age or the evolution of a human life from youth to adulthood to old age. The symbol of the
interlocking gyres reveals Yeats’s belief in fate and historical determinism as well as his spiritual attitudes toward the development of the soul, since creatures and events must evolve according to theconical shape. With the image of the gyre, Yeats created a shorthand reference in his poetry that stoodfor his entire philosophy of history and spirituality.
∆ Conclusion :
The poem expresses ‘W. B. Yeats‘ opinion on the state of anarchy in Ireland and his belief in the coming of a second incarnation of God to save humanity from sin. The poem is an impressive representation of the time and situation in Ireland during the twentieth century and Yeats’ belief in the power of a higher being to save humanity.
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References :
1) Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (2024, April 16). William Butler yeats. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Butler-Yeats
2 ) 1, K. joshi M. (2023, April 29). The Second coming critical analysis. English Literature | English Literature Zone | Free Literature Notes.https://englishliteraturezone.com/the-second-coming-critical-analysis/
3) Scribd. (n.d.). Themes in the Second coming. Scribd. https://www.scribd.com/document/514829356/Themes-in-the-Second-Coming
4) Scribd. (n.d.-a). Symbols in the poem the second coming. Scribd. https://www.scribd.com/document/514829430/Symbols-in-the-Poem-the-Second-Coming
