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 the 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?
In January 1919, William Butler Yeats began work on The Second Coming, a foreboding, anarchical epic of a poem, which would become one of his best known works.
With the First World War barely over, the Russian Revolution in motion and the poet’s home country of Ireland on the brink of political turmoil; the socio-political landscape of the time was characterised by immense uncertainty. The world seemed to be teetering on the verge of some great change, the precise form of which was yet to be seen.
The poem embodies this uncertainty, with its eerie, apocalyptic sense of impending crisis.
Its first few lines – “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer” – immediately evoke a sentiment of helplessness and inevitability which echoes the world in which Yeats was writing.
Yet the poem’s popularity extended long after its initial publication: one hundred and five years later, it is among the most frequently referenced, cited and pillaged poems, in popular culture and political spheres alike.
Two exceptional literary works of the mid-twentieth century played a big part in its boom in popularity. Chinua Achebe’s 1958 Things Fall Apart tells the story of the clash between tradition and change in Igboland, Nigeria, on the cusp of colonialism. The novel’s depiction of the ruin of a society by colonial power made it a revolutionary touchstone in African literature.
Ten years later, Joan Didion’s seminal essay collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, strove to make sense of another rapidly changing landscape; the USA amidst the Sixties revolution.
After Achebe and Didion came interpretations by singers such as Joni Mitchell and Lou Reed, and novelists including Stephen King, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
Whilst the political landscape today is obviously far different from that of a hundred years ago, certain sentiments, of political and social uncertainty, still remain. It was Yeats’ own belief that history and the passage of time are cyclical, repeating in 2,000 year cycles around a “gyre”, a structure like a cone or spiral. The Second Coming describes the end of one such cycle, after “twenty centuries of stony sleep”.
The perpetual recycling of the poem over the last hundred years suggests that this may be true on a smaller scale. History does indeed repeat itself, and arguably far more frequently than the poem suggests. Thus, it’s no wonder that the poem continues to resonate: whilst the context may differ, the unpredictability in the world seems omnipresent.
It seems that for every political crisis, it can be applied, albeit with varying degrees of heavy-handedness. The motif of “slouching towards” something – whether that be victory, war, mediocrity, or anxiety – is perennially popular, yet often misinterpreted. As is rightly pointed out in The Paris Review, the slouch of Yeats’ beast is not towards an inevitable fate or impending doom, but rather a determined pursuit of his final destination. It is an assertion of arduous, steady progress towards change.
Whilst criticism has been directed at the continual poaching of the poem’s lines, often in contexts entirely devoid of Yeats’ original sentiment, its perpetual appeal should be neither underestimated nor ignored. It seems that there is comfort to be found in a literary work that addresses head-on this sense of insecurity, rather than shying away from it.
In the introduction to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion writes that The Second Coming provided “the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern”.
It is human nature to try to impose order and seek a semblance of control in a world that proves, time and time again, that it cannot be controlled. The Second Coming demands that we confront the futility of this, whilst concurrently offering a strange kind of solace by shining a light on the perpetuity of these concerns.
“tears of stone (Never give all the heart, poem)” by talourcera is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0