“The Second Coming” was intended by Yeats
William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. He was a driving force behind the Irish Lite…
Why did William Butler Yeats write the Second Coming?
William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, soon after the end of World War I, known at the time as “The Great War” because it was the biggest war yet fought and “The War to End All Wars” because it was so horrific that its participants dearly hoped it would be the last war.
What does Yeats mean by the Beast will come?
The beast will come, Yeats is assured of this, but not yet; by the end of the poem, the veil has dropped again, the monster is no longer, and Yeats writes that ‘twenty centuries of stony sleep / were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle’, implying that whatever is coming for the world, whatever monster, will be here soon.
What has happened to the world as Yeats knew it?
The very world as he knew it – here no doubt represented in the immediate world as Yeats knew it, which was Europe – has started to crumble.
Who has taken phrases from William Yeats's poem?
Over the past century, Joan Didion, Chinua Achebe, Lou Reed, Stephen King, and scores of other writers and artists have taken phrases from Yeats's poem as lines and titles of their own works.
What is Yeats actually referring to using the term The Second Coming?
“The Second Coming” was intended by Yeats to describe the current historical moment (the poem appeared in 1921) in terms of these gyres. Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre.
When did William Yeats write The Second Coming?
January 1919The poem was written in January 1919 and published 100 years ago this month. With its wealth of memorable lines, it is one of the most oft-quoted poems of the 20th century.
What seems to be the main idea of The Second Coming?
Major Themes of “The Second Coming”: Violence, prophecy, and meaninglessness are the major themes foregrounded in this poem. Yeats emphasizes that the present world is falling apart, and a new ominous reality is going to emerge.
What kind of poem is Second Coming?
Yeats believed that history is cyclical, and “The Second Coming”—a two-stanza poem in blank verse—with its imagery of swirling chaos and terror, prophesies the cataclysmic end of an era.
What does the second stanza of The Second Coming mean?
Stanza 2. The poet repeats the idea of second coming three times that symbolizes his eager for Christ's second coming. Soon the poet sees a big image of Spiritus Mundi. Though it was supposed to provide relief, the poet is troubled by seeing it.
What is the central idea of the poem The Second Coming elaborate?
The basic theme of the poem is the death of the old world, to be followed by the rebirth of a new one. It draws upon Biblical symbolism of the apocalypse and the second coming of Christ to make its point. However, Yeats poses the question of what will be born out of this overwhelming chaos.
What does The Second Coming talk about?
The Second Coming (sometimes called the Second Advent or the Parousia) is a Christian and Islamic belief that Jesus will return again after his ascension to heaven about two thousand years ago. The idea is based on messianic prophecies and is part of most Christian eschatologies.
What does the widening gyre mean?
The 'gyre' metaphor Yeats employs in the first line (denoting circular motion and repetition) is a nod to Yeats's mystical belief that history repeats itself in cycles. But the gyre is 'widening': it is getting further and further away from its centre, its point of origin.
Where did Yeats write The Second Coming?
Yeats began writing the poem in January 1919, in the wake of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and political turmoil in his native Ireland.
What is the historical context in which The Second Coming was written?
William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, soon after the end of World War I, known at the time as “The Great War” because it was the biggest war yet fought and “The War to End All Wars” because it was so horrific that its participants dearly hoped it would be the last war.
What is the second coming of Yeats?
The poem describes the increasing disorder of mankind and its possible salvation by not Christ, but a half-man/half-animal figure.
What is the meaning of the poem "The Second Coming"?
Yeats' most famous poem, 'The Second Coming.' Written after the devastation of World War I, it uses a religious metaphor to capture a Europe in chaos and on the brink of change.
What did Yeats believe about the after images?
It is worth noting that Yeats believed that poets were privy to spiritual ‘after images’ of symbols and memories recurring in history, and especially available to souls of a sensitive nature such as poets.
What does Yeats say in the first stanza?
We see it throughout the first stanza: Yeats’ words take on an edge of doomed and destroyed innocence (‘things fall apart, the center cannot hold’). The very world as he knew it – here no doubt represented in the immediate world as Yeats knew it, which was Europe – has started to crumble.
What does Yeats say about nature?
By comparing it to the very nature that Yeats spoke about in the first part of the poem, he brings out the almost infallible quality of this beast: like nature, it feels nothing for the suffering of man. It is and will be when man has turned to ash and dust in its weak.
How long has Elise been analysing poetry?
Elise has been analysing poetry as part of the Poem Analysis team for neary 2 years, continually providing a great insight and understanding into poetry from the past and present.
What happened at the time of the second coming?
At the time of ‘The Second Coming’ being written, much of the world had grown disillusioned with the turn of the century. From ushering in new and wonderful inventions – the motorcar, small aircraft, and others – it had gone to fray apart. In different parts of the world, revolution brewed and broke out: the Russian Revolution of 1917, ...
What is the apocalypse in Yeats' poem?
In Yeats’ poem, the apocalypse is a much quieter, more understated, affair. It opens up with the disturbance of nature. ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer’. Falcons were used as hunting animals since the medieval era.
What is the second coming?
Summary of The Second Coming. ‘The Second Coming’ was Will iam Butler Yeats’ ode to the era. Rife with Christian imagery, and pulling much inspiration from apocalyptic writing, Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’ tries to put into words what countless people of the time felt: that it was the end of the world as they knew it and that nothing else would ever ...
Who is William Butler Yeats?
Along with Seamus Heaney, William Butler Yeats is one of Ireland's most prominent poets . He was born in 1865 and began writing around the age of seventeen, and this poem appears in his 1921 collection, Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Yeats's influences were wide and diverse, including the English Romantics—figures such as Wordsworth, Blake, and Keats—and the French Symbolists, such as Stephen Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud. Irish mythology and folklore were also especially formative of his work, particularly given his desire for Ireland's political independence from England.
What is the point of the 20th century in Yeats' poem?
The poem conceives of the 20th century as the point when one gyre of history —the "twenty centuries" of Christianity and "progress"—gives way to another.
How many words are in the analysis of alliteration in The Second Coming?
Unlock all 260 words of this analysis of Alliteration in “The Second Coming,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.
What is Yeats' vision?
Yeats's Vision — A website dedicated to exploring and understanding the heady text Yeats wrote about his view of the world. Yeats's Voice — In this clip, Yeats reads one of his most famous poems in his distinctive tone. A Reading of the Poem — Dominic West (of The Wire fame) reads the poem.
Why does Yeats place the falcon front and center in the opening lines of the poem?
Yeats places the falcon front and center in the opening lines of the poem to represent humanity's control over the world. The fact that the falcon "cannot hear" its master thus symbolizes a loss of that control.
How many lines are there in The Second Coming?
"The Second Coming" has two stanzas, with eight and fourteen lines respectively. The form does not fit any standard scheme. That said, both stanzas bear a slight resemblance to the sonnet form (an octet followed by a sestet ). The first stanza is an octet, and the second does have the same number of lines as a sonnet. This is pretty much where the similarities end, and it's hard to know whether Yeats intended the form as a gesture toward sonnets. If he did, perhaps this slight resemblance could be Yeats's way of suggesting a break with tradition ("the centre cannot hold"). Perhaps the poem strives to be contained in sonnet form, but the force of the vision and the beast itself are too much to contend with, so the form breaks down.
Why does the poem "The End Times" suggest that the end times are already happening?
The poem suggests that the end times are already happening, because humanity has lost all sense of morality —and perhaps that this morality was only an illusion to begin with. In the first stanza, the speaker describes the chaos, confusion, and moral weakness that have caused “things” to “fall apart.”.
When was the second coming of Yeats published?
The poem is built to last. “The Second Coming” was published in both The Nation and The Dial in November 1920 and then in Yeats’s collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). Yet it did not attain what Dwan calls its “problematic ubiquity” until some time after the second world war.
What year was Yeats?
In August 2016, as Trump slouched towards Washington, the Wall Street Journal declared: “Terror, Brexit and US Election Have Made 2016 the Year of Yeats”, after the research company Factiva found that phrases from the poem had already notched up more appearances in the press than in any other year in the previous three decades.
Why is the poem "Things Fall Apart" so popular?
One reason for the poem’s booming popularity was its supporting role in two influential masterpieces. Chinua Achebe ’s Things Fall Apart (1958) enshrined it in the vocabulary of African independence. By 1971, the Guardian observed, the title had become “an African catchphrase”. Joan Didion ’s essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) had a similar effect in the US at a time of stomach-churning flux. Didion opened her book with the poem because its lines had “reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there … the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern.”
How old was Yeats when he asked Mannin to free him?
The 70-year-old Yeats was a Nobel prize-winning poet of immense stature and influence, not to mention Mannin’s former lover, and she asked him to join a campaign to free a German pacifist incarcerated by the Nazis. Yeats responded instead with a reading recommendation: “If you have my poems by you, look up a poem called ‘The Second Coming’,” he ...
What was the symbol of the second coming?
Crucial to “The Second Coming” was the symbol of the gyre (a cone or spiral) and Yeats’s conviction that history moved in 2,000-year cycles.
What is the first stanza of the poem about?
The first stanza is a series of punchy declarations about a crisis of authority, almost as if Yeats were an op-ed writer in full thunder. The oracular second stanza asks why this is happening and imagines what might follow the phase of anarchy: the second coming will be a reversal of the first.
What movie said "So the falcon's heard the falconer, huh"?
When Gordon Gekko quipped, “So the falcon’s heard the falconer, huh?”, in the film Wall Street (1987), it must have been assumed that more than a few viewers would clock the reference. In Stephen King’s colossal bestseller The Stand (1978), in which a weaponised “superflu” wipes out most of humanity, one character says: “The beast is on its way. It’s on its way, and it’s a good deal rougher than that fellow Yeets [sic] ever could have imagined. Things are falling apart.” Some knowledge is also required to appreciate the parodic final line of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens (1990), in which the Anti-Christ is seen “slouching hopefully towards Tadfield”.
What are some examples of poems from The Second Coming?
Examples of works whose titles draw from "The Second Coming" include: Chinua Achebe 's novel Things Fall Apart (1958); Joan Didion 's essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968); Peter De Vries 's novel "Slouching Towards Kalamazoo" (1983); Robert B. Parker's novel The Widening Gyre (1983); the 1996 non-fiction book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline by Robert Bork; the song "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (which quotes or paraphrases almost all of the poem) by Joni Mitchell from her 1991 album Night Ride Home; by Lou Reed in his preamble to the song "Sweet Jane" on the 1978 album Live: Take No Prisoners; the episode " Slouching Toward Bethlehem " (27 October 2002) of the television series Angel; and the episode " Revelations " (9 November 1994) of the science fiction television series Babylon 5. Stephen King 's novel The Stand references the poem numerous times, with one character explicitly quoting lines from it. Junkie XL 's soundtrack to Zack Snyder's Justice League features a song titled "The Center Will Not Hold, Twenty Centuries Of Stony Sleep", referencing the "second coming" of Superman after his death in the film's prequel, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, and his subsequent resurrection in this film.
What does the poem "The Apocalypse and Second Coming" mean?
The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to allegorically describe the atmosphere of post-war Europe. It is considered a major work of modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.
What is the meaning of the second birth in the poem?
Yeats used the phrase "the second birth" instead of "the Second Coming" in his first drafts. The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic: In the weeks preceding Yeats's writing of the poem, his pregnant wife Georgie Hyde-Lees caught the virus and was very close to death.
When was the poem "The Black and Tans" written?
The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence that followed the Easter Rising, at a time before the British Government decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland.
When was Yeats' poem published?
Yeats's poem was published in November 1920. And over the century since, perhaps no poem has been more invoked for vexing times, to convey, in Yeats's own incomparable words, that:
Who took phrases from Yeats' poem?
Over the past century, Joan Didion, Chinua Achebe, Lou Reed, Stephen King, and scores of other writers and artists have taken phrases from Yeats's poem as lines and titles of their own works. Yet as Roy Peter Clark, Senior Scholar at the Poynter Institute, notes in an elegant recent post, history must also note that William Butler Yeats became ...
Who wrote the second coming?
Irish poet William Butler Yeats circa 1920. William Butler Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" a hundred years ago, when the world seemed on the verge. Perhaps like now, perhaps like many years. The losses of the First World War were still overwhelming when millions more began to die in the waves of a flu pandemic, which infected Yeats's wife, ...
Who was Yeats' wife during the First World War?
The losses of the First World War were still overwhelming when millions more began to die in the waves of a flu pandemic, which infected Yeats's wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, while she was pregnant. She and their child would survive. Yeats's poem was published in November 1920.
Is "The Second Coming" a holiday poem?
I would scarcely call "The Second Coming" a holiday poem. But it makes you feel that that a page of history is about to flip: one epoch is about to give birth to another. And what kind of times will be wrought from a world where, "the worst are full of passionate intensity?" Yeats asks:
