Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and the new year

Yeats’s “The Second Coming” affords a grim look into a future in which the cumulative events of history have led to societal, spiritual entropy.  The initial image is that of a falcon spinning circularly out of control above the head of its master. Then Yeats catalogs distressing events that describe modern man’s condition. Anarchy, blood, the drowning of innocence. It’s a world where the “best” people have lost their spark, enervated rather than challenged by the pandemonium around them. The “worst” people, however, are passionate and intense.

The speaker answers his own reflections becoming rhetorical with what might be epiphany. “Surely the second coming is at hand.” It mimics Christians parodied as carrying their placards emblazoned with “The end is near.” But instead of Christ, instead of the Middle East, he visualizes a Sphinx and images of desert sands and birds, which symbolizes ancient Egypt, a far philosophical cry from Christianity.

Of course, anyone with even a casual brush with religious training immediately associates “second coming” to the second coming of Christ. Yeats intended that. But the speaker goes on to reveal that the 2,000 years since Christ’s birth, of Christendom, is coming to an end. In its place the pitiless nightmare symbolized by the now in motion Sphinz, “slouching” and “rough” is about to be “loosed on the world.” The world watches and waits. And it’s not looking good.

Adam Cohen writing an op/ed piece for the New York Times discusses the poem. He cites Jim McDermott, who titles a speech before the Senate “The Centre Cannot Hold.” The speech demands that President Bush make a stand on the war 2/07.  Many other allusions to the poem abound made by writers from Joni Mitchell to the Beatles to Chinua Achebe to writers for “The Sopranos.”

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?