For this week’s blog post I decided to focus on the poem “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats. To completely understand the meaning of this poem I had to do some background research on it. I found that the poem was written just after the end of World War 1. This helped me to contextualize and understand the first stanza of the poem. The first stanza paints a picture of chaos and anarchy where a falcon cannot hear its caller and people have lost their way. Based on the time that this poem was written I came to understand that this state of chaos was referencing the war that had just occurred. I especially found this symbolism of the falcon to be very important. I thought that the line, “falcon cannot hear the falconer” might be a commentary on humans losing their connection to earth and nature. The image of things falling apart and “innocence is drowned” makes me think that the poem is arguing that humanity has lost its way and war has created a failed rather than successful society.
The second stanza then dives into a religious discussion that is alluded to in the poem’s title: The second coming of Christ. In Christianity the second coming of Christ is essentially the day that Jesus returns to judge his enemies, reward the faithful, and set up his kingdom. I found it very interesting that the title of the poem alludes to this event and then paints a very different picture. In the second stanza the speaker lets out calls of a second coming. However, in contrast to the biblical telling, the speaker describes an image of a “shape with lion body and the head of a man” coming out of the desert. The poem then says, “that twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle”. I believe that these twenty centuries are referring to humanity’s time on earth and that its “stony sleep” was interrupted by this brutal war that disrupted all progress they had made. I think that the purpose of this beast appearing in the re-envisioned second coming is meant to argue that humans have failed and this beast is coming as a way to punish them for their shortcomings.
The Second Coming
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I enjoyed your interpretation of The Second Coming and how there seems to be this impending doom awakening, which results from the chaos and bloodshed that men have created. What I also really liked about the second stanza, in particular, is the imagery of the desert. The vultures referenced in “Reel Shadows of the Indignant Desert Birds” (17) invoke a sense of dread, almost like something is dying. This is quite fascinating, especially when juxtaposed with the imagery of Christ, specifically his birth. It is pretty rare to see Christ being depicted in such a dark light, which suggests that the previous 20 centuries of his love have ceased. This could also be further evidenced by your research, tying it to World War 1. Perhaps Christ has given up on humanity and left us to our own devices so the beast inside us all can prowl the desert, searching for potential corpses. Or perhaps I am reading into it wayyyyyyy too darkly.
I completely agree that learning that this poem was written right after the first world war adds so much meaning to it. I was really struck by the pessimism of the poem, and specifically how the poem has endured for so many years. I had heard “the center cannot hold” just as a phrase before, and I didn’t realize until reading this poem what it meant.