The Second Coming is a poem by W.B. Yeats.
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The falcon cannot hear the falconer, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and the tide is loose.
The Second Coming is surely a revelation.Hardly are those words out when I see a large image of a lion and a man in the desert.
Everything in the poem except the rough beast is said by Yeats.What is the answer?
The book of Revelation is alluding to the poem.The Anti-Christ is the rough beast.The scene is set for the Second Coming.The poem gives humankind the possibility of redemption despite its pessimistic tone.The persona isn't necessarily presenting a traditional Christian world view.
The poem is a response to the Great War.The persona's horror at the slaughter that the war unleashed is conveyed in language heavy with religious significance.
A society spinning out of kilter is depicted in the poem's opening line."The falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" are metaphors for the rise of radical politics."The falconer" and "the centre" are both God and this is a spiritual crisis as much as a worldly one."Turning and turning in the widening gyre" alludes to a view of history expressed elsewhere by the poet.The scope of the crisis is emphasized by saying that the ceremony of innocence is drowned.These are allusions to the Book of Revelation.There is a spiritual aspect to the crisis befalling humankind.The worst persona says they are full of passionate intensity.The best lack all morals.It was a conviction.The best don't have the conviction to act.One is full while the other is lacking.The other acts but does not think.Society is beset by chaos, as depicted by images of "The blood-dimmed tide" and "indignant dessert birds".They become agents of chaos when they give in to their primitive urges.
The persona's plaintive cry is "Surely some revelation is at hand".It seems like it is.An allusion to the Temptation of Christ, as well as a fanciful vision of a shape with a lion body and a man's head, is what the persona issailed by.It seems more likely that it is a personification of the physical and spiritual crisis at hand, rather than the "rough beast", as the persona uses the phrase "The darkness drops again" to draw a distinction between the two.The hybrid creature may personify humankind's dual natures: reason/instinct, head/heart, order/chaos, reactionary/radical.
It has been almost two thousand years since the birth of Christ.The "rough beast" made its way to the place for the final confrontation after centuries of waiting.
The slaughter of the Great War is compared to the biblical end times by the persona.
There is an interpretation of the poem.There is a sphinx-like beast in the desert.It is possible that this is the rough beast that he refers to, and that the metaphor of the creature adds depth to the poem.
A Vision is an obscure book that Yeats wrote about his mystical belief system.He believed that history repeats itself in cycles.The poem has a connection to the first part.
In the second part of the poem, Yeats talks about his belief system.The spirit of the world is the translation Yeats held to be a collective soul or folk memory, a repository of all cultural history.Christian culture is a small part of the whole.
The vision that Yeats saw was very similar to the one in the poem.
There was a desert and a black titan in the middle of a heap of ancient ruins that I could not control.
The poem can be read in its entirety.The resurrection of a thousand dead gods is called the "rough beast".It will wipe out our Christianised culture and return us to a primitive state.
There is no doubt that Yeats was aware of the symbolic values of his verse, because he talked about them himself.He wrote a poem in 1936.
This refers to the rise of Facism in Europe.Yeats may be assigning himself an excessive level of foresight.January 1919 is when the poem was written.The world was falling apart in the aftermath of the first world war, making it easy to fear for the future, but it seems unlikely anyone could have been specific about their fears.
"A Vision": Explications and Contexts was written by W. B. Yeats.A Preface to Yeats was written in 1978.
If the previous civilization began with a birth in Bethlehem, then whatever comes next symbolically repeats the pattern.When we see the fall of the old, how would we know what's next?What rough beast?
The rise of fascists in German could be what Yeats was referring to in the poem.Think about it; "rides towards Bethlehem to be born?"A powerful symbol to the Jewish faith is the birthplace of Christianity.