Thinking activity : W B Yeats poems
1) Analysis of ' The Second Coming '.
The Second Coming
| Written | 1919 |
|---|---|
| First published in | The Dial |
| Country | Ireland |
| Language | English |
| Form | Lyric poetry |
| Publication date | 1920 |
| Media type | |
| Lines | 22 |
| Read online | "The Second Coming" at Wikisource |
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: somewhere in sands of the desert
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
Reel 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 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. 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. The highest death rates of the pandemic were among pregnant women—in some areas, they had up to a 70 percent death rate. While his wife was convalescing, he wrote "The Second Coming".
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, Georgie Hyde-Lees, while she was pregnant. She and their child would survive.
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:
"Things fall apart; the center 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."
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:
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
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 enamored of nationalist authoritarian movements, including fascism. He said admiring things about Mussolini and eugenics. He wrote a few anthems for the Blueshirts, an Irish fascist group. When we read, recite, or fire our minds with Yeats's poem, do we somehow condone the devastating ideas which he came to favor? What works do we choose to keep or discard as we reconsider our history and art?
Ann Patchett, the novelist and memoirist, told us this week that, "If we applied today's morals to dead artists, then history would be fairly scrubbed of art. The question to ask is, 'Does this poem still speak to people?' Yeats passes the test. It continually means something new because that's what great art does - it is reinvented, re-energized, by the person who reads it."
What we make of Yeats's poem a century later is like the history ahead, waiting to be made: it's up to us.
On being asked for a War Poem
‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ is a poem by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), written in 1915 and published the following year. It’s one of Yeats’s shortest well-known poems, comprising just six lines, and sets out why Yeats chooses not to write a ‘war poem’ for publication. Before we analyse ‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’, here’s a reminder of the text of the poem.
POEM
I think it better that in times like these
Apoet’s mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.
In summary, ‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ is a poem about refusing to write a war poem when asked to produce one. This odd act of refusal-as-assent – writing a poem, but a poem which takes a stand against writing a certain kind of poem – has the air of irony about it, and Yeats probably intended his poem to be taken as a brief ‘thanks, but no thanks’.
In terms of its form, the poem is written in iambic pentameter, rhymed abcabc. The final two lines are the only ones which might cause some real head-scratching from readers (and critics), but Yeats appears to be making an appeal to the broad readership that poetry (including his poetry, by 1915) enjoyed: young girls might enjoy his romantic verses about old Ireland, while an old man might enjoy the ballads.
But why that title? Who has ‘asked [Yeats] for a war poem’? It was the American novelists, Henry James and Edith Wharton – who were good friends and who both came to live in Britain – who approached him: Wharton was editing an anthology, The Book of the Homeless, the profits from which would go towards helping refugees of the war. That anthology appeared in 1916, complete with Yeats’s contribution, which appeared under the alternative title ‘A Reason for Keeping Silent’.
Why did Yeats refuse to write a ‘war poem’? In February 1915, Yeats had written to his friend Lady Gregory: ‘I suppose, like most wars it is at root a bagman’s war, a sacrifice of the best for the worst. I feel strangely enough most for the young Germans who are now being killed.’ Yeats goes on to say that the ‘bespectacled’ Germans he has seen remind him more of himself than the English soldiers (‘footballers’) or the French troops.
In a letter of the same year, sent to John Quinn, Yeats wrote that the First World War was ‘merely the most expensive outbreak of insolence and stupidity the world has ever seen and I give it as little thought as I can.’ These remarks leave us in little doubt about how Yeats viewed the conflict, and help to explain why he wrote ‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’.
Instead, Yeats’s poetry of this period focuses on the fighting closer to home, such as the Easter Rising of 1916 (in ‘Easter 1916’), and, just after the end of the First World War, the longer struggle for Irish independence from British rule (in ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’).
And then there is ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, in which an Irish pilot fighting for Britain in the First World War predicts that he will die in that war, but he feels no sense of patriotic duty towards Britain, the country he fights for. He is fighting for Britain because, although he is Irish, Ireland was under British rule at the time (independence, leading to the formation of the Republic of Ireland, would not be achieved until 1922, four years after the end of the war). Instead, he identifies as an Irish patriot, rather than a British one.
‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ could be productively analysed alongside ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, for this reason. Yeats objected to the war, and could not imagine using poetry to wave the flag for the right ‘side’ (and his Irish blood would have boiled at the idea of writing a patriotic poem in support of the British troops in the war!). His line ‘We have no gift to set a statesman right’ is a forerunner to Auden’s famous line that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, and the similarity is no coincidence: Auden makes that well-known statement in his elegy for W. B. Yeats, written in 1939.
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