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?
The second coming is a symbolical poem which
represent the prophetic vision of W.B Yeats who began to write his poetry in
tradition of self-conscious,romanticism which he learned from the poet of
1890’s. He was highly influenced by Spenser, P.B Shelley and William Blake. The
poem represents the deplorable position of the world especially after the
first world war.
W.B Yeats is a symbolist. His poetry represents the world in a
symbolical manner.His important poems include ‘The Tower’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’
& ‘The wild swans’etc. The poem opens with the spiral movement turning and
turning. The poet says that we have move into gyre and historical movement
which probably started with the birth of the Jesus Christ. But now the human
civilisation has gone so far from its initial point that we have almost forgotten
our base or the ground from where we started.
“The poet says-
Turning
and turning in the widening gyre
The
falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”
The poet describe the
pathetic situation that exist in the society. There is anarchy in the world.
The world dominated by blood thirsty game and the ceremony of innocence has
been completely drowned. Man has become passionate to express his views only. He
doesn’t want to live together. He expresses his feelings with intensity and
violence. He has progressed due to scientific & technological knowledge.
But at present he has lost control over it. The poet fears that science may
create harm and havoc to human civilisation. The rulers of the world are
involved in imperialism and expending circles of power to such an extent that
they can fulfil whatever they wish.
The second stanza of
the poem begins with the prophetic vision of second coming. The second coming
is a biblical reference. The world
Spiritus Mundi stands for a kind of storehouse
of image in W.B Yeats philosophy. There is a kind of revelation. The poet feels
that a new civilisation is going to take birth. The poet has the vision of
sphinx-“ A shape with lion body and the head of a man”
The poet has the
vision of sphinx rising at the end of the world & moving slowly towards the
world from a distant desert to Bethlehem, the birth place of Jesus Christ. The
monster is so ferocious and nightmarish that bird are scared due to horror and terror.
The coming of the sphinx symbolises that the rocking cradle of 20th
century is going to come to an end. It is going to bring death to the present
civilisation. It symbolises merciless violence.
The second coming
describe the 20 centuries of stony sleep. The idea has been taken from Chinua
Achebe’s famous novel ‘Thing fall apart’. The symbols used by W.B Yeats conveys
a number of meanings which are linked with the personal thought & inspiration.
According to him life is a journey up a spiral staircase. As we grows older we
cover the ground we have covered before
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