The Second Coming, huh? This is an apocalyptic poem if I've ever read one! Brimstone and fire coming down to damn us all for our sins and for being the creators of war which have scorched our Earth. Okay, you get the picture so let us get down to where Yeats is going with all of this..
First Verse:
So as the Norton tell us, this is post World War One & The Russian Revolution. Which, to date (in modernity), are the most violent and heinous events of human conduct. The body count was out of control and the people left in the wake were suffering and trying to rebuild, "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". Yeats saw this all as the process of his 2000 year cycle starting. He believed that every 2000 years a new age would begin, but before that process could begin there had to be great suffering in order to achieve this 'revelation.' The first stanza tells us how we have brought this apocalypse onto ourselves. We've tainted tides with innocent blood and yielded to 'passionate intensity,' or our animalistic nature, and perpetuated violence with brute force instead of expressing our convictions in civilized manners.
Second Verse:
*Background- Yeats was a big fan of locking himself in pitch dark and soundproof rooms & he believed after a while, his unconscious would play out like a movie before his eyes and show him the future, or clarify things in the world that he could not understand during the waking life aka his collective unconscious*
The revelation he has in the second verse is one that he is having while in his chamber. He dreams of the Sphinx getting up and roaming the desert. But why the Sphinx? Perhaps the Sphinx represents Ireland. Traditionally the figure has a female face, read: Mother Ireland. Also it is considered merciless, read: IRA soldiers who will battle for Independence in the Anglo-Irish War. Line 16: "Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it/Reel shadows of indignant desert birds" Yeats is telling us that it is his job as the poet (read:bird) to express the true feelings of the Irish people through his art. The people feel that they are being unjustly treated like savages by the British. He is using poetry and artistry to tell the story of how violent wars are necessary in order to achieve a new age of enlightenment.
How Yeats felt:
First off, the "passionate intensity" and brute force you mentioned reminded me of Kurtz. Reading this poem kinda gave me anxiety, I agree that it is very apocalyptic! The way it's written almost makes it seem like the speaker is a prophet of some sort, able to see things no one else can. That might be a stretch but that's what I got out of it. The two stanzas definitely differ in tone too. The first one seems really confident and sure of things, and the second one seems a little more unsure, because the poem leaves you with an open ended question.
ReplyDeleteAshlee,
ReplyDeleteI agree that this poem is by an apocalyptic by far, the poem as a whole had such a dark feeling to it. I read this poem a few times and it is still very hard for me to get a handle on the meaning of it. The most powerful line in the first verse I my opinion is “and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned” because I feel like it really shows what the second coming is going to do. The innocence I think is everyone’s daily life and I feel like it could also be read as ignorance, for we could have turned a blind eye to what caused the second coming to happen. I found the back info that Yeats sat in a pitch-dark room alone very interesting and I can see how is able to write a poem like this from doing that. I liked your reading that the sphinx represents Ireland, I did not see it that way at first. I feel like the line “A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” is from the sphinx and it is giving that gaze from all of the repression it has experienced.
Daniel Pietaro
I noticed my hands starting to sweat during this poem, the words Yeats used sent chills up my spine as well. All along, I felt the speaker was some sort of all-knowing being bringing doom to people, but at the end, it kinda threw me off because he left everything so open. I also questioned why he had a dream of a Sphinx and what that was supposed to represent, but now, I definitely agree that maybe he was talking about Mother Ireland after all. At first I was thinking that maybe the Sphinx just represented the whole mood of the poem, but I really like your reading of it. I loved that Daniel mentioned how he was writing this poem in a pitch-dark room, it made me laugh because I too now realize that his dark mood was intended entirely.
ReplyDeleteI didn't realize the sphinx represented Mother Ireland either, good observation! Reading over the poem again, I looked at the idea of the gyre and how it represents fragments of society (more fragments...), and how it's building, just like the history of society. The meaning of Spiritus Mundi= spirit of the world, and I noticed how in the second stanza, the speaker is establishing a kind of spiritual connection with all these symbols that represent events rooted in the past. I also think that Yeats makes a point to establish the tentativeness of the past and present in terms of historical achievements, and how these achievements can become obsolete at any point in time. ("stony sleep")
ReplyDeleteI really like this poem! But that may be because I like Yeats in general. I love the picture you posted.
ReplyDeleteAt first, I thought that it was going to be inappropriate, because it placed Yeats above the masses, but the pondering pose is perfect for him. But if Yeats is the desert bird, what is the the falcon placed in the first stanza. If the falcon is the same bird that is referred to later, then it would seem that it was placed in the same disarray as everyone else. If not, then what is it? Yeats has a strange fascination with birds; I'm almost surprised that a swan didn't make its way in here; the swan being a woman, it is strange that Yeats would exclude the female form from one of his poems, as he rarely does that.
It's nice to see a bit of the Irish represented in this class, but I kind of wonder why we didn't see anything (at least, not since 'A Modest Proposal') earlier. Oh well, 'Easter 1916' is coming up, and I'm interested in seeing what this class thinks of that!