The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats
Critically examine close reading of W.B. Yeats’s postmodern poetry The Second Coming.
(Black and white image of an older white man seated at a table with books)
Twentieth-century heroically humanist W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming is a symbolic incarnation” of the imagination of resurrection allegorically satirizing the pathogenic cycle of the historical First World War nationalistic spirit of the Irish independence movement and coterminous flu pandemic enmeshed within Christian imageries.
The Messianic Saviour of humanity’s salvation, Jesus Christ, although redeems as a prolific resurrectionist transfiguration of crucified atonement within Biblical tradition, nonetheless, which Yeats majestically inverts as mental apparitions of the eschatological apocalypse. This is starkly evident in the poetic lines by the allegorical personification of the beast’s rebirth in the dismal gloom of dystopian anarchic Jerusalem “And what rough beat, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Yeats’s envisioning of poetic voice and pictorial shroud heralds dramatic, visionary, aesthetic, elegiac, lyric and philosophic language in accord to macabre of ending the ceremony of innocence, the end of Christian dispensation and the desecration of the divine destination heritage site of Bethlehem.
Lion’s body and humans’ head Urizenic mythical beast is that ultimate sinisterish gothicism of “That twenty years of stony sleep/ Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,” as foreshadowed by revival of the sphinx’s second coming. Furthermore, the penchant of this demoniac spirited cherubim reincarnation illustrates the failure of the French Revolution and the failure of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice. The moral satire of the aristocratic elitist upper class sophistication with fascism implicates the death of spiritualism despite the advent of Christ’s resurrection in view of the redemptive quest for salvation.
“Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world./ The blood dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” After all the heroic return of Jesus’s reincarnation of the resurrectionist spirit is replaced by the poet laureate with the advent of a grotesque beast, the Egyptian Sphinx. And this gossamery of the Christian revelation has drowned the ceremony of innocence by a bloody trench war over a community of civilization. Modernity has divided into the world with the sunken titanic and widespread disenchantment, violence and extremism, bloodshed of massacred lives have been mystically visualized by The Second Coming.
The quagmire of Second Coming is an apocalypse collapse of civilization into anarchy furthermore is heralded by the verbosity of “That twenty centuries of stony sleep /Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,” enmeshed by devastation of things falling apart and the center cannot hold. Twenty centuries had elapsed since the crucifixion and promised return of Jesus Christ. However, the sphinxlike creature in its stony sleep has been poised in the desert, awaiting the time when it will be unleashed upon the earth.
The Beast of Apocalypse is a slough of despond for these derailed and directionless everyman Christians personified falcons from their Christ figure in the personified abstraction of the Falconer. Thus the massacre of innocents by Herod and possibly the ceremony of baptism is evoked by the drowning of innocent provincial lives with the sea of a blood bath by the surreal demonic Anti Christ. Falcon is a manifestation of symbolic allegorical colonial Ireland harbouring the Irish nationalist rebels, reactionaries and revolutionaries as implied by the worst full of conviction.
On the contrary Falconer is a manifestation of symbolic allegorical British Isles and Britannic kingdom whilst their productivity and efficacy diminishes as implied in the poetic diction the best lack all conviction. Furthermore The Great World War I, The Russian Revolution, Ester Rising 1916 underscore the politico socioeconomic allegorical inferences permeated throughout the poem.
Further Reading
Kremen. R Kathryn, Yeats’s Secularization of Christian Events pp. 272-74, The Imagination of the Resurrection: The Continuity of Religious Motif in Donne, Blake and Yeats
Kremen. R Kathryn, Yeats’s Subjectification of Religious Language: Three Poetic Examples, pp. 281, 283, The Imagination of the Resurrection: The Continuity of Religious Motif in Donne, Blake and Yeats
Tabor College Library Hillsboro Kansas, Internet Archive, Yeats Harold Bloom, Michael Robartes and the Dancer, The Second Coming, pp. 317-325
Selected Poems W.B. Yeats, York Notes Advanced, A Norman Jeffares, pp. 43-44