The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats
" The Second Coming" is one of Yeats' most mystical and least understandable poems. It belongs to the symbolic and visionary phase of the poet's artistic development. Most of the imageries used in this poem are drawn on his highly mystical and obscure book,
A Vision where Yeats puts down his philosophical readings and views of human history. One of his views is when he sees history in terms of two big and small circles; when the one completes its entire circular movement, the other will start. Hence the end of the bigger circle and the start of the smaller one refer to the end of a former history and the start of a new one. These two circular movements which Yeats uses in his book A Vision describe the inevitable movement of change within human history. He calls each movement a " gyre", a spiral movement. Yeats' later poetry is marked by the use of the image of the gyre as it is the case in the present poem. " The Second Coming" as such warns against the end of history and the start of a new one with different values and traditions.
Yeats actually states this change in the opening lines of the poem when he describes the modern world as being lost," turning" into a big gyre. In that hurricane-like movement in which modern world is lost, values and old traditions of society are lost too; it is like when a falcon( a bird of prey) is lost in a tornado or a whirlpool. There, the falcon loses contact with its falconer just like societies lose their old values that represent the spiritual centre of life. Everything seems lost flying ever away in that moral tornado; the centre of life ( values, religion, traditions, morals, etc) can no longer attract people. The situation becomes mere " anarchy".
The poet views human history-- since the crusades, the two world wars, the hegemony of capitalism etc-- covered and dimmed with blood and violence. Logic and rationality themselves are lost; the best minds( wise men) are looked at as bad and the worst minds( politicians and war mongers for example) are much respected. The picture described by the poet is an upside down one; it is a very sad and pessimistic picture.
In the second part of the poem, the poet is sure that this gloomy picture of the world must hide something behind its back, " some revelation is at hand". He refers to a second coming of something. The question is: was there a first coming at all? Yes there was a first coming; it was that of Jesus Christ who came with a heavenly message to save the world more than 20,000 years ago.
However, the poet does not see in the second coming as something good which will save the world again. NEVER. He explains to us what he means by the second coming of the poem: he envisions or foresees a great disaster coming to overwhelm the modern world and not Jesus Christ to save it. Because the "Spiritus Mundi "—the violent and materialistic spirit of the modern world—is horrible, a freakish creature with the head of a man and a body of a lion is looking blankly and pitilessly at the world and is lurking to jump and devour it at once. Materialism, lack of morals, death of God in the life of modern societies, bloodshed, terrorism, dictatorships, absence of human rights etc are this new beast which has come to destroy the old innocent world.
The poet describes a very vivid picture of that freakish creature in the later lines of the poem. He says that the creature is not coming alone, but is accompanied by swarms of birds of death to finish everything in the old world. This creature ( the second coming) is moving( slouches) towards Bethlehem—the very place where Jesus Christ was born " twenty centuries " ago—to occupy it and declare itself as a new God . It is clear now that the poet refers to the mundane materialistic thinking of modern societies as being their new God. They, in short, worship money, competition, betrayal, lack of true friendships, absence of human compassion, the shattering of the family as a nucleus for healthy societies etc etc etc. This is the beast which replaces Jesus Christ and his great values of love, tolerance, forgiveness and peace.
The famous German philosopher and thinker Frederick Nietzsche spoke about this disaster a century before W. B. Yeats in his notorious book The Death of God. Nietzsche then stressed the absence of moral and spiritual values from western societies. He too warns against the coming of new values from which God is absent.
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