The Second Coming made this phrase popular and later inspired Chinua Achebe to write his remarkable novel -'Things Fall Apart'. With strong opinions on anarchy, this poem actually takes the term for the return of Jesus from the heaven - the Second Coming. The idea that the centre cannot hold gave rise to what can be the modern age. The anti-centrism in this poem is unmistakenly clear.
This poem has two parts. One is the time before the Second Coming and one soon after. The last line can be compared The Lamb by Blake, where the poem raises questions. Who made thy? Or in the poem, The Tiger, who made thy fearful symmetry? Simmilarily, in Doctor Faustus, Helen's face is cannot be discribed and therefore the question is "Is this the face that lauched a thousand ships?" So throughout literature we see how questions are the best substitutes for a doubt in description. Now, with this background, Yeats presents a clear picture of imagery. Every line in the poem talks about the visual element and conjures strong images. Image and sight are strong words meant to imply that when the Second Coming happens, one can clearly see it. And it is only a matter of time before that happens.
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe 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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?
- William Butler Yeats
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
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2 comments:
Obviously, this poem undercover of Marxism. we can't consider him as Post-Tribulationalists or was he really a revelator? Lines has had tender intonation sketched with strong words and ends up with arithmetic mean. yup, we can't understand without relating something to some other thing. After all, willy-nilly perceptions.
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