The Second Coming (poem) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

"The Second Coming" is a poem composed by Irish

Irish people

The Irish people are an ethnic group who originate in Ireland, an island in northwestern Europe. Ireland has been populated for around 9,000 years , with the Irish people's earliest ancestors recorded having legends of being descended from groups such as the Nemedians, Fomorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha...

poet William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms...

in 1919 and first printed in The Dial
The Dial
The Dial was an American magazine published intermittently from 1840 to 1929. In its first form, from 1840 to 1844, it served as the chief publication of the Transcendentalists. In the 1880s it was revived as a political magazine...

(November 1920) and afterwards included in his 1921 collection of verses titled Michael Robartes and the Dancer
Michael Robartes and the Dancer
Michael Robartes and the Dancer is a 1921 book of poems by William Butler Yeats.It includes the poems:# Michael Robartes and the Dancer# Solomon And The Witch# An Image From A Past Life# Under Saturn# Easter, 1916# Sixteen Dead Men# The Rose Tree...

. The poem uses Christian

Christian

A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

imagery regarding the Apocalypse

Apocalypse

An Apocalypse is a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, i.e. the veil to be lifted. The Apocalypse of John is the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament...

and second coming

Second Coming

In Christian doctrine, the Second Coming of Christ, the Second Advent, or the Parousia, is the anticipated return of Jesus Christ from Heaven, where he sits at the Right Hand of God, to Earth. This prophecy is found in the canonical gospels and in most Christian and Islamic eschatologies...

as allegory to describe the atmosphere in post-war Europe. The poem is considered a major work of Modernist poetry

Modernist poetry in English

Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. In common with many other modernists, these poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional...

and has been reprinted in several collections including The Norton Anthology of Modernist Poetry.

History

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

. While the various manuscript revisions of the poem refer to the Renaissance, French Revolutions, the Irish rebellion, and those of Germany and of Russia, Richard Ellman and Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...

suggest the text refers to the Russian Revolution of 1917

Russian Revolution of 1917

The Russian Revolution is the collective term for a series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. The Tsar was deposed and replaced by a provisional government in the first revolution of February 1917...

. Bloom argues that Yeats takes the side of the counter-revolutionaries and the poem suggests that reaction to the revolution would come too late. Early drafts also included such lines as: "And there's no Burke

Edmund Burke

Edmund Burke PC was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party....

to cry aloud no Pitt

William Pitt the Younger

William Pitt the Younger was a British politician of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He became the youngest Prime Minister in 1783 at the age of 24 . He left office in 1801, but was Prime Minister again from 1804 until his death in 1806...

," and "The good are wavering, while the worst prevail."

Origins of terms

The word gyre
Gyre (disambiguation)
A gyre is any manner of swirling vortex, particularly a natural phenomenon. It can refer to* An ocean gyre, its most common meaning.* A cyclone or hurricane.* A maelstrom or other type of whirlpool.* A tornado.* USNS Gyre , a research ship....

in the poem's first line may be used in a sense drawn from Yeats's book A Vision
A Vision
A Vision: An Explanation of Life Founded upon the Writings of Giraldus and upon Certain Doctrines Attributed to Kusta Ben Luka, privately published in 1925, was a book-length study of various philosophical, historical, astrological, and poetic topics by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats...

, which sets out a theory of history and metaphysics

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...

Yeats claimed to have received from spirits. The theory of history articulated in A Vision centres on a diagram composed of two conic helixes ("gyres"), overlapping each other, so that the widest part of one cone occupies the same plane as the tip of the other cone, and vice versa. Yeats claimed that this image 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 and began moving along the inner gyre.

The lines "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" can be read as a paraphrase of one of the most famous passages from Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...

's Prometheus Unbound, a book that Yeats, by his own admission, regarded from his childhood with religious awe:

"The good want power, but to weep barren tears.

The powerful goodness want: worse need for them.

The wise want love, and those who love want wisdom;

And all best things are thus confused to ill."

In the early drafts of the poem, Yeats used the phrase "the Second Birth", but substituted the phrase "Second Coming" while revising. The Second Coming

Second Coming

of Christ referred to in the Biblical

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

Book of Revelation

The Book of Revelation is the final book of the New Testament. The title came into usage from the first word of the book in Koine Greek: apokalupsis, meaning "unveiling" or "revelation"...

is here described as an approaching dark force with a ghastly and dangerous purpose. Though Yeats's description has nothing in common with the typically envisioned Christian

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. This image points rather to the sinister figure of Antichrist

Antichrist

The term or title antichrist, in Christian theology, refers to a leader who fulfills Biblical prophecies concerning an adversary of Christ, while resembling him in a deceptive manner...

that precedes the Second Coming of Christ.

The manticore

Manticore

The manticore is a legendary creature similar to the Egyptian sphinx. It has the body of a red lion, a human head with three rows of sharp teeth , and a trumpet-like voice. Other aspects of the creature vary from story to story. It may be horned, winged, or both...

or sphinx

Sphinx

A sphinx is a mythical creature with a lion's body and a human head or a cat head.The sphinx, in Greek tradition, has the haunches of a lion, the wings of a great bird, and the face of a woman. She is mythicised as treacherous and merciless...

like beast described in the poem had long captivated Yeats' imagination. He wrote in 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.

The phrase "stony sleep" is drawn from the mythology of William Blake

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

. In Blake's poem, Urizen

Urizen

In the complex mythology of William Blake, Urizen is the embodiment of conventional reason and law. He is usually depicted as a bearded old man; he sometimes bears architect's tools, to create and constrain the universe; or nets, with which he ensnares people in webs of law and conventional culture...

falls, unable to bear the battle in heaven

Heaven

Heaven, the Heavens or Seven Heavens, is a common religious cosmological or metaphysical term for the physical or transcendent place from which heavenly beings originate, are enthroned or inhabit...

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 Popular Culture

DC Comic's Batman serial "The Widening Gyre", written by Kevin Smith, and illustrated by his lifelong friend and muse, Walter Flanagan, was entitled after the opening line of this poem and draws heavily from Yeats' various complex themes and symbology.

In African written literature, Chinua Achebe's watershed English language novel Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apartis a 1958 English language novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It is a staple book in schools throughout Africa and widely read and studied in English-speaking countries around the world. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first African...

also takes its title from Yeats's poem.

The Roots

The Roots

The Roots is an American hip hop/neo soul band formed in 1987 by Tariq "Black Thought" Trotter and Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. They are famed for beginning with a jazzy, eclectic approach to hip hop which still includes live instrumentals...

' album Things Fall Apart (album)

Things Fall Apart (album)

Things Fall Apart is the fourth studio album by American hip hop band The Roots, released February 23, 1999 on Geffen Records. Recording sessions for the album took place at Electric Lady Studios during 1997 to 1999, coinciding with recording for other projects of the Soulquarians collective,...

takes its title from Yeats's poem.

External links

Text of the poem

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