The Second Coming (poem)

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"The Second Coming" is a poem by William Butler Yeats first printed in The Dial (November 1920) and afterwards included in his 1921 verse collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses religious symbolism to illustrate Yeats' anguish over the apparent decline of Europe's ruling class, and his occult belief that Western civilization (if not the whole world) was nearing the terminal point of a 2000-year historical cycle.

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War.^[1] However, the various manuscript revisions of the poem refer to the French and Irish Revolutions as well those of Germany and Russia; as a result, it is unlikely that the poem was solely inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which some claim Yeats viewed as a threat to the aristocratic class he favored.^{[citation needed]}

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."^{[citation needed]}

The sphinx 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.

Critic Yvor Winters has observed, "…we must face the fact that Yeats' attitude toward the beast is different from ours: we may find the beast terrifying, but Yeats finds him satisfying – he is Yeats' judgment upon all that we regard as civilized. Yeats approves of this kind of brutality."

Manuscript variations can be found in Yeats, William Butler. Michael Robartes and the Dancer Manuscript Materials. Thomas Parkinson and Anne Brannen, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.

1 The Poem
2 Origins of terms
3 Allusions to the poem
4 References
5 External links

[edit] The Poem

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?

[edit] Origins of terms

The word gyre used in the poem's first line is 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 centers on a diagram composed of two conical spirals, 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. Around these cones he imagined a set of spirals. Yeats claimed that this image (he called the spirals "gyres") 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). Yeats believed that in 1921 the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic moment, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre.

The lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" are 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:

In each human heart terror survives

The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear

All that they would disdain to think were true:

Hypocrisy and custom make their minds

The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.

They dare not devise good for man's estate,

And yet they know not that they do not dare.

The phrase "stony sleep" is drawn from The Book of Urizen by William Blake (one of the poets Yeats studied most intensely). 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.

In the early drafts of the poem, Yeats used the phrase "the Second Birth", but substituted the phrase "Second Coming" while revising. His intent in doing so is not clear. The Second Coming described in the Biblical Book of Revelation is here anticipated as gathering dark forces that would fill the population's need for meaning with a ghastly and dangerous sense of 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, just as Christ transformed the world upon his appearance.

The "spiritus mundi" (literally "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.

[edit] Allusions to the poem

The poem includes several phrases that have become a part of popular culture; such as the line "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."

Chinua Achebe titled his most famous novel Things Fall Apart (1958), prefacing the book with the poem's first four lines. Achebe's novel adheres to Yeats' theme by evincing the sudden collapse of African societies in the age of European colonialism.

The hip hop group The Roots titled their 1999 album Things Fall Apart taking the name from the above novel.

The poem is referred to several times directly and indirectly in Stephen King's epic novel The Stand.

Joni Mitchell set this poem to lyrics in her song "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" originally on her "Night Ride Home" CD.

All but a few lines of the poem have been lines of dialogue on the television show The Sopranos, including one episode in which Dr. Melfi tells Tony "The center cannot hold. The falcon cannot hear the falconer".

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. used "The Second Coming" as the epigraph to his book The Vital Center. More than a half-century later, he explained that the poem had been "less of a cliché in 1948" than it had become currently.^[2] In 1986 Schlesinger, in The Cycles of American History, again referenced this poem with prophetic paraphrase: "Still, let us not be complacent. Should private interest fail today and public purpose thereafter, what rough beast, its hour come round at last, may be slouching toward Washington to be born?"

The opening lines were used by The Technical Boy as Mr. Wednesday's eulogy in Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods.

This final phrase, "what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" is another of Yeats' best-known lines.

Joan Didion's 1968 collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, references the poem, as does Nina Coltart's 1993 book "Slouching Toward Bethlehem... and Further Psychoanalytic Explorations", as well as numerous popular songs, movies and novels. Conservative judge Robert H. Bork used the poem as an inspiration for the title of his 1996 book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline. In response, syndicated sex columnist Dan Savage chose Skipping Towards Gomorrah as the title for his 2003 book (ISBN 0-45-228416-3).

The tenth of Robert B. Parker's novels featuring the detective Spenser is titled The Widening Gyre.

Librettist Myfanwy Piper included the line "The ceremony of innocence is drowned" into the dialogue of the ghosts of Peter Quint and the former governess, Miss Jessel, in Benjamin Britten's opera, The Turn of the Screw.

Adam Cohen, of the New York Times on 12 February 2007^[3] commented how the poem has been used more and more as a metaphor for the war in Iraq.

The band Electric Six makes a reference to the poem in their song "Jimmy Carter" (from the album Señor Smoke), which features these lines: "And there's a plague of locusts upon us and there's a nightmare in the swarm. And there's a lion out in the desert slouching to Bethlehem to be born... again."

In the finale to the animated series Mighty Max, Max's mentor, Virgil, quotes the poem in reference to the apocalyptic scenario the main villain has brought about. "And now, things fall apart. The centre cannot hold. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

Singaporean poet Ho Joe Han has frequently cited this poem as the defining influence of his career in English literature, maintaining the line "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" as his slogan for the better part of 20 years.

Conor Oberst, lead singer and songwriter for the band 'Bright Eyes', alludes to the poem in his song 'Four Winds', released March 2007. The second chorus reads "Four winds, cry until it comes/And it's the sum of man/Slouching towards Bethlehem/A heart just can't contain all of that empty space/It breaks, it breaks, it breaks" referencing the last line of 'The Second Coming.'

In the series Angel, there was an episode entitled "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" which involved a foretelling of the end times.

In the sci-fi television series Andromeda, two episodes are titled "The Widening Gyre" and "Its hour come round at last"

Portions of the poem are quoted in one episode of the sci-fi television series Babylon 5.

Part of the poem is quoted in a cut scene from the sci-fi computer game Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom between Admiral Tolwyn and Senator "Paladin" Taggart.

The poem is featured in Oliver Stone's film Nixon, delivered by Richard Helms, Director of the CIA played by Sam Waterson to Richard Nixon played by Anthony Hopkins. It is also alluded to in Stone's 1987 film Wall Street, when Gordon Gekko says to Bud Fox, "So sport, the falcon has heard the falconer."

In John Barnes' Kaleidoscope Century, the last two lines of the poem are featured as chapter titles.

Maria Helena Dolan, a lesbian writer/activist from Atlanta, wrote a regular column called "Slouching Towards Lesbos" in "ETC Magazine," a now-defunct Atlanta Gay publication, from 1980 - 1990. Copies of the columns (still inside the magazine) are housed in the Atlanta History Center Center within a collection entitled "The Atlanta Lesbian and Gay History Thing."

San Francisco Bay-area pop group The Loud Family, led by Scott Miller, titled a 1993 EP Slouching Towards Liverpool, employing a reference to the poem to also allude to the hometown of the group's forebears The Beatles.

Cabaret duo Kiki and Herb regularly incorporate lines from the poem into live renditions of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", playing upon that song's repeated line, "turn around, bright eyes".

The title of the interactive fiction game Slouching Towards Bedlam, which is set partly in Bethlem Hospital (aka Bedlam), is a reference to the poem.

Author Nick Bantock makes reference to lines from The Second Coming at the beginning and end in each book of the Griffin and Sabine series. This is remarked upon in his biographical book, The Artful Dodger.

Author Matthew Reilly quotes "Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer" as an opening statement which later relates to the anarchy that will be unleashed on the world in his novel Scarecrow

In "A Peanut Christmas", a collection of Peanuts Christmas comics, the poem is referenced at the bottom of page 108. Peppermint Patty dresses as a sheep for the Christmas pageant and trips on a curb. Marcie turns to her and says," Slouching toward Bethlehem, huh sir."

In Sam Shepard's play, "Cowboy Mouth" the character Slim quotes "Now what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?" in reference to the 'Lobster Man' who is to take his place as the next rock n'roll idol/savior.

In Daniel Pinchbeck's book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Daniel Pinchbeck references the poem in conjunction with the Apocalypse.

In the final episodes of 'The Sopranos' AJ reads the poem and later quotes it to friends.

In Jamie Delano's John Constantine Hellblazer,the Original Sins Issue, Constantine refers to the lines "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

In George R. R. Martin's 1983 novel The Armageddon Rag, fictitious rock band the Nazgûl used "The Second Coming" as the lyrics to one of their songs.

[edit] References

^ Haugheny, Jim (2002). The First World War in Irish Poetry p.161. Bucknell University Press.
^ Schlesinger Jr., Arthur M. (2000). A Life in the Twentieth Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917—1950. p.510. Houghton Mifflin.
^ What W. B. Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’ Really Says About the Iraq War - New York Times