Today’s Poem: The Second Coming
The dawn of a new age is at hand, and we won’t much like it when it comes
We are living at a time near the end of the world. Our mirror has crack’d from side to side. Things fall apart.
A sense of doom has always been part of the human condition, of course. How could it not? Order always succumbs to chaos. Written into history is a tale of cataclysm. Written into the natural world is a story of entropy. Written into the self is awareness of death and decay. If we had no sense of transience and fragility, we would lack a piece of human experience — just as we would lack a piece if we had no sense of invention, progress, and improvement.
Still, some eras seem especially prone to a feeling of dissolution and dismay, with others given over to pride and progress. What is interesting about the 19th and 20th centuries is that they seemed to have both. Even as it climbed from height to height, the modern age was haunted by a sense that order — beauty, truth, the ceremonies of innocence — were being overwhelmed by some new barbarism. An old order was giving way to something new and strange.
“This Birth was / Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,” as T.S. Eliot imagines the Magi saying at the death of the pagan age and birth of the Christian, after they had seen the Christ child. “We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation.” From Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” to C.P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” and Eliot’s own The Waste Land, plenty of modern poems hold a sense of a collapsing age, the failure of order and meaning. And the most famous, the most often quoted, may be “The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats (1865–1939).
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When Yeats wrote the chiliastic poem in 1919, he had in mind the slaughter of World War I, which had just ended. And maybe the Communist revolution in Russia. And certainly the epidemic of the Spanish Influenza, which had nearly killed his pregnant wife. But the poem grew in strength the more abstract it became, the more universal a view it took of impending change. In his edits over the course of a year, Yeats gradually erased the particularities of the history he was relating — replacing references to the French Revolution, for example, with the general idea of an era dying.
That dying era, he thought, was Christendom’s. The opening stanza relate, in words as memorable as English poetry has managed, the sense of a dying age. When Yeats writes “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” he means it as an indictment: This is a sign of times gone wrong, for it ought to be the other way around.
The second stanza relates the loss to a mythology of historical cycles — since “twenty centuries of stony sleep,” the “pitiless” rule of pagan power, “Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,” the coming of the Christ child.
Yet eventually the old one wakes: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” The beast has, Yeats says in his blank-verse pentameter lines, “A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” Surely the change of ages is at hand, surely some revelation is near, and surely we won’t much like it when it comes.
The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats
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?
It is a great poem. But I have always agreed with Peter Simple / Michael Wharton’s prescription that there should be criminal penalties for citing it. He made that observation thirty years ago and the sentence retains its justice, though quite what penalties should be imposed is a matter for the judge’s temper. Even I would be loathe to impose the death penalty on someone who stares at me in the face and says “things fall apart the centre cannot hold”. I think they should be muted for at least 24 hours like God muting people who disbelieve prophecy in scripture. Dumbing is the most apposite penalty.
This is a wonderful poem for teaching; working through the imagery with a class of bright students is among my best memories of the classroom. The poem itself gives me chills every time I read it.