Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Yeats, a non-Christian, does not use the Second Coming of Christ in a literal sense; rather, he uses it as symbolism for his primary audience, Christian Europe. The Second Coming is known as a cataclysmic event- the final chapter of history and the end of all things- and Yeats uses poetic imagery to describe it:
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,These lines are a commentary on the general state of man. Again, one should only consider the world in 1919: the nations were traumatized, and all that seemed to be good was overshadowed by war, pestilence and plague. As bad as the world seemed, it was but "mere anarchy," a shadow of things to come.
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.
Yeats says that the best of men "lack all conviction" while the evilest "are full of passionate intensity." When good men lack the conviction to do good, they will not rise to stop those who are passionately intent on doing evil. Yeats read the times well, as it was this lack of conviction that would allow men like Adolf Hitler to come to power.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
It is not Christ who is slouching towards Bethelehem. It is us. We are the beast. According to Yeats, there is not an external doom coming to the world. The world is creating its own doom. We, humanity, will be the ones who destroy ourselves. The world is on the downgrade, continually slouching towards desolation and, ultimately, darkness.
EDIT: I commented on His Beloved's "Questions concerning 'The Second Coming'" and Mallory Searcy's "First post on the honor's blog."
Or, if you want the short version of this post, here it is: Yeats says the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
ReplyDeleteDude, that was brillant. You put that in a way I wish I could have. I love how you said that we are the beast slouching towards Bethlehem because that still fits in with the Sphynx imagery-the Sphynx is a testament to the inventiveness of man. Unfortunately, like you said in the above comment, Yeats was pretty much on the money.
ReplyDeleteI agree that I love the way you said this. When we were reading the poem in class and I learned that Spiritus Mundi meant the spirit of the world, I knew that the beast could not be Christ, but something more worldly and caused by humans. During class Nick and I joking said that maybe Yeats was just a prophet, because only about 20 years after this poem is written the world is almost destroyed again by human conflict. If Yeats were a prophet (which I highly doubt is true), but if he was, then the beast would be the Nazi party or Hitler which was on its way to attack God's chosen people, the Jewish, which is what Bethlehem would represent.
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