‘The Second Coming' W. B Yeats's Vision

The second coming is a poem written by William Butler Yeats in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War, and was published in the American magazine “The Dial” in November 1920. Later on, it was included in the volume entitled ‘Michael Roberts and The Dance’ in 1921. It was written when Yeats was puzzled by violence, displaying events like the Easter rebellions of 1916, the Irish war of 1914 to 1918. And in terms of his philosophy a new age in the world’s history was going to begin.

He believed that the full circle of the wheel i.e. the moon corresponds in the time to approximately 2000 years. At the beginning of each such year period a new dispensation is announced. This pattern could be seen in the history of the world from about the year 2000 BC. in that year “The Egg of Leda” is supposed to be hatched out. In Greek mythology Leda is the mother of Helen, Castor, Pollux and Clytemnestra. These were her children by her union with the great God’s Zeus who appeared to her and made love to her not in his own form but in the assumed form of Swan. From the date that Jesus appeared to Leda the first known age of the world began. The second coming written with the Irish troubles, the Great war and displaying his philosophy of ‘A Vision’.

This powerful poem was born out of the poet’s conviction that the Christian civilization was nearly at the end of the allotted time span of 2000 years. And, a new phase antithetical to it in nature was about to begin. The convection arose out of the deepening disintegration of Europe of which the First World War and the political commotion in Ireland were the explosive symptoms. Thus, the poet’s mind was filled with gloom in consequence of the widespread murder and bloodshed in Ireland in the course of Easter rebellion of 1916. The poem is the outcome of a state of mind troubled with ominous thoughts.

Seeing the world through an “occult lens” again, his political worldview became strongly tied to his knowledge in occult lore. He believed politics and religion to be part of the same enterprise, and inevitably foresaw crucial shifts in cultural and class politics as well as in the relationship of Ireland to England to Europe. Tumbled with the experiences of the violence of war, he developed his own ideas for the contemporary world political situation, and also had his own mystical view of the history and the future end of the world. Consequently, William Butler Yeats began to create the philosophy of gyres, which became prevalent images in his poetry. This philosophy of gyres is not of any lasting importance, except for the impact it had on his poetry, because it reappears in ``A Vision, “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Byzantium”. Additionally, it is extremely complicated, wherefore Yeats outlined his theory in a note on “The Second Coming”: the end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of the greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction.

With those intersecting cone-shaped spirals Yeats’ understanding of the apocalypse and his belief in the reversal of eras is expressed. He “manages to hint the end of all while explicitly the reversal of the world’s gyre, the birth of a new, violent, bestial anti-civilization in the destruction of the two-thousand-year Christian cycle”. Yeats’ belief system was, history repeats itself with differences .Therefore, he believes a “second coming” to be imminent, which means in Christian tradition the return of Christ, or respectively the birth of Antichrist: the ‘second coming’, a phrase violently wretched from its usual meaning of Christ’s return to establish a heaven on earth, and made, rather, to describe the onset of a civilization or ‘anti- civilization’ founded on terrifying violence.

Thereby the importance of a poem like “The Second Coming” is its presentation of the “difficult correlation between Christ and modern times on the one hand, on the other, between Christ and the historical cycle that his coming invalidated”. Further, it is with his iconic, prophetic, even apocalyptic imagery and thinking the most vivid record of such prophetic insights William Butler Yeats is known for.

The opening image derives from the System and the widening gyre, an historical movement or trend that started at the birth of Christ, is figured as a falcon towering. In the System, this gyre is accompanied by a diminishing gyre which reaches its minimum at the same time as the first reaches its widest extent, which may therefore be linked to the ‘twenty centuries of stony sleep’; these gyres have the inevitability of the tides, and like them are connected to the Moon and its phases. In the symbol of the falcon, the falconer represents control but stands at the lowest point of the gyre’s apex, so that, as the falcon towers higher, it can no longer hear the controlling centre. This leads to the stark, simple statements ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’. Indeed, much of the power of the opening section derives from the simplicity of its language, as well as the accumulation of symbols and images, which proceed with an oneiric logic through a single sentence: falcon’s gyre widening, disintegration, anarchy, tide of blood, drowning of ceremony of innocence, weakness and passion. Also, the second coming of God seems to be round the corner given in the first two lines of the second stanza. Surely some revelation is at hand, surely the second coming is at hand. No sooner does the idea flash across the poet’s mind, he sees the image of some bizarre form coming out of the spiritus mundi. A kind of storehouse of images are present in Yeats's philosophy; for example, the grotesque image the body of lion and the head of human being is seen coming out of some distant desert and advancing slowly and with clumsy and ungainly movement.

The conclusion part of the ‘Second Coming’ is a magnificent statement about the contrary forces at work in history and the conflict between the modern world and the ancient world. The aesthetic experience of its passionate language ensures its value and its importance in Yeats’s work as a whole.