Yeats: The Second Coming

The Second Coming
W.B. Yeats (1919)

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: 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?

The above poem, included in The Norton Anthology of Modernist Poetry and considered an excellent of example of modernism, contains some of the very imagery I seek to engage in my work. Readers will notice the apocalyptic imagery, as well as the allusions to Christian doctrine and eschatology, and decide that the poem is about the end times. Given the date of its writing, it moreover can be read as a modernist response to the devastation in the wake of World War I. The second stanza's "lion body" with "the head of a man" recalls the beasts straight out of Revelations in the Christian Bible, which, when juxtaposed with the "rough beast" slouching toward Bethlehem, suggests the end of an era and the beginning of a new.

This reading, while cursory, is widely accepted. An alternate reading is accessible as well, however. The idea of the "gyre" and the expansive sense of the first stanza evoke fear in the speaker's tone. When "things fall apart" and the "center cannot hold," civilization as we know it comes crumbling down, rent apart by the velocity of change. Yet, for those of us on the margin, this kind of change might not be the dreadful event the speaker depicts. The "twenty centuries of stony sleep" that "were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle" suggest the birth of Christ as the most recent transformative event in this grand sense of human history, establishing a moral center to redeem the human race for its manifold sins. While the destruction of this Christian--not even Judeo-Christian--belief might trouble the Christian speaker, it this kind of event that social activists seek to throw the center off kilter, realigning sociocultural ethics to support inclusion of a once-marginalized group.

The destructive imagery, then, leads to a generative space where we can define new rules and new mores. The danger in this idea, of course, is that complacency might lead to the same kind of tightly controlled order that had to be destroyed to effect change. A paradox like this evokes many questions, including some I'd like to include in a section of my work on "The Center". Here are a few I'd ask for this poem:

1) Consider the violent imagery in the poem. Choose on such image and identify what, exactly, is being destroyed. How does the speaker's choice of imagery and diction clue us in to what change the speaker bemoans?
2) What can we say about the speaker's cultural proclivities and how that might alter his perspective of "the center" being destroyed? Might a different speaker represent this kind of change in a different light?
3) We know that WWI was followed in two decades by WWII; the speaker did not know this when he wrote the poem. If we take the poem to be a modernist expostulation about new warfare and the decimation of humanity it allows, what kinds of different "centers" might the speaker be discussing? In light of more recent history--nuclear nonproliferation pacts, the rise of humanitarian rules in warfare--how might the speaker's perspective have changed, if at all?

I think the above questions help to identify the idea that the speaker has a particular perspective he or she brings when writing a poem, a "center" on which he or she grounds beliefs and fears. The high drama of the poem's imagery makes it easy to see the first suggested reading, about war and destruction. However, because of its inherent drama, it is also easy to deconstruct assumptions about the poem's meaning, using perspective to show how the author might have simply been afraid of change.