We begin our blog on circles with “The Second Coming,” a well-known poem by William Butler Yeats. My first encounter with the Yeats poem was in a beloved 11th grade English class taught by Ms. Guccione who used the John Ciardi book How Does a Poem Mean to teach the poetry section. The poem was written in 1919, at the end of World War I and the Russian Revolution, when many saw humanity’s future as uncertain. Immediately the poem spins us into a whirlpool with the opening words, “Turning and turning,” and by the end of the line we are in a “widening gyre” (a vortex or maelstrom) where a falcon cycles so far out that it can no longer hear or heed its master. The prediction is dire with collapse and loss of gravity.
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?
Some of Yeats’s poems contain references to a mystical system of intersecting cone shapes he devised in which the world undulated through 2000 year cycles — each cycle overthrowing the old order only to be spun out again in new uncertain order. With its many biblical references and apocalyptic visions that speak for generations across continents, Yeats’s poem has influenced writers such as Joan Didion who referenced its last line for her book Slouching Toward Bethlehem, to rock musicians, to the writers of the popular tv series “The Sopranos” who derived plot lines and themes from the poem. Here’s a link to a rebus posted by Fu Jen University which uses book covers that have been influenced by this poem:
http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/English_Literature/poetry_modern/2nd_coming/2dcoming.htm
“The Second Coming” was the last poem in the Ciardi book, bringing Ms. Guccione’s poetry lesson full circle and leaving us with an apocalyptic message that played into our own visions of what was to come for our generation. I was 15 when I wrote “Judeo-Christians losing hold” next to the word “falconer” in the first stanza, and under the words “Slouches toward Bethlehem,” I wrote: “second coming, a mixed blessing.”
How would you characterize the second coming that Yeats’s describes?
AnnaLee Wilson
One Page Poetry Circle 
In “The Second Coming” the great circle which gives order to the world is broken. Man is no longer in control. The future is grim indeed. I was frightened by this poem when I read it in high school and I find it even more frightening and more true today. The powerful symbols anticipate the end of the world. The falcon in the first verse becomes only the shadows of “indignant desert birds” in the second. A sphinx-like creature replaces Jesus. How can anything good come of all this?
I read this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye on Facebook this morning and it made me happy — it made me wish that life was like this and wonder why life is not like this.
After learning my flight was detained 4 hours,
I heard the announcement:
If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic,
Please come to the gate immediately.
Well—one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.
An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress,
Just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly.
Help, said the flight service person. Talk to her. What is her
Problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she
Did this.
I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly.
Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick,
Sho bit se-wee?
The minute she heard any words she knew—however poorly used—
She stopped crying.
She thought our flight had been canceled entirely.
She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the
Following day. I said no, no, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just late,
Who is picking you up? Let’s call him and tell him.
We called her son and I spoke with him in English.
I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and
Would ride next to her—Southwest.
She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it.
Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and
Found out of course they had ten shared friends.
Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian
Poets I know and let them chat with her. This all took up about 2 hours.
She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life. Answering
Questions.
She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies—little powdered
Sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts—out of her bag—
And was offering them to all the women at the gate.
To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a
Sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California,
The lovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same
Powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.
And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—
Non-alcoholic—and the two little girls for our flight, one African
American, one Mexican American—ran around serving us all apple juice
And lemonade and they were covered with powdered sugar too.
And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—
Had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing,
With green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always
Carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.
And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and thought,
This is the world I want to live in. The shared world.
Not a single person in this gate—once the crying of confusion stopped
—has seemed apprehensive about any other person.
They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women too.
This can still happen anywhere.
Not everything is lost.
I had to laugh when I read this. My favorite part of the poem is “And then the airline broke out the free beverages from huge coolers—”
I like the following line which pulls you back a bit from the partying of the part you like: “Non-alcoholic.”
I don’t remember if I read “The Second Coming” in high school. When I read it in college, for a course on Modern Poetry, I was struck by Yeats’ ability to turn a memorable phrase, but not so much by the content of the poem.
I take it with a grain of salt when poets dabble in philosophy or cultural history. I acknowledge such dabbling as a means to poetic inspiration, but generally poets tend to be a little naive and/or superficial when it comes to a serious knowledge of such subjects, unless they have studied them in depth.
Among the problems I had, and still have, with this poem are Yeats’ focus on Western Civilization, to the exclusion of other world cultures, to promulgate his ideas about the cyclical nature of culture; the eccentric nature of his cyclical theory of culture; and what strikes me as his pro-aristocratic, anti-democratic proclivities.
The opening image, the falconer losing control of the falcon, is meant to illustrate the assertion that “Things fall apart; / the center cannot hold; // Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” How does the illustration work to illustrate this? A hierarchical superior loses control of an obedient subordinate. And what is meant by characterizing “anarchy” as “mere,” as if obedience is somehow better than anarchic freedom.
In researching what seems to me to be this anti-democratic tendency in Yeats, I came across an excerpt from an essay by George Orwell on Yeats. In this essay, Orwell writes:
“Translated into political terms, Yeats’s tendency is Fascist. Throughout most of his life, and long before Fascism was ever heard of, he had had the outlook of those who reach Fascism by the aristocratic route. He is a great hater of democracy, of the modern world, science, machinery, the concept of progress — above all, of the idea of human equality. …
“…as early as 1920 he foretells in a justly famous passage (‘The Second Coming’) the kind of world that we have actually moved into. But he appears to welcome the coming age, which is to be ‘hierarchical, masculine, harsh, surgical’, and is influenced both by Ezra Pound and by various Italian Fascist writers. He describes the new civilisation which he hopes and believes will arrive: ‘an aristocratic civilisation in its most completed form, every detail of life hierarchical, every great man’s door crowded at dawn by petitioners, great wealth everywhere in a few men’s hands, all dependent upon a few, up to the Emperor himself, who is a God dependent on a greater God, and everywhere, in Court, in the family, an inequality made law.’ ”
and so forth.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_21-2-2004_pg3_7
(to be continued)
Larry, you make some excellent points. Too often (as with Pound) poets are fascists because they just want order in the world so that they can write. Yeats’s system of belief, like T.S. Eliot’s reliance on the idea of the Fisher King is more about metaphors for poetry than anything else.
I agree with you about the image of the falcon and the falconer. On the one hand I have seen falconers handle the falcon and love the regular circles the falcon makes and the majesty of the bird, but it always saddens me that these magnificent birds are “tamed” and not wild.
Abigail, what you say about poets longing for order so they can get some peace of mind and work, rings true. You can probably substitute writers, painters, sculptors, composers, and others who are trying to make order out of chaos. Perhaps those who see apocalyptic visions are seeing into themselves.
From my bookcase, I pull out “Prose Keys to Modern Poetry,” edited by Karl Shapiro (New York, Harper & Row, 1962), and find therein the section of Yeats’ “A Vision,” titled “The Great Wheel.”
This is where Yeats discusses his theories of gyres, cones, lunar phases, and the wheel. as explaining the history of Western culture, and being able to predict the future of Western culture. If I tried to summarize this, my summary would probably be longer than what Yeats wrote (like the scene in the movie, “The Paper Chase,” in which a law student writes a summary of a law textbook for his study group, and his summary is longer than the textbook).
What I can say, relatively briefly, is that Yeats was erudite. In tracing the genesis of the idea of gyres and cones in Western thought, Yeats refers to Empedocles, Heraclitus, Simplicius, Plato’s ‘Timaeus’, Alcemon (a pupil of Pythagoras), Acquinas, Swedenborg, and Flaubert–and that’s just in the first couple of pages! As Karl Shapiro says in his introduction to this excerpt:
” ‘A Vision’ is a literary curiosity by one of the most renowned poets of our century. Purportedly dictated to Yeats’s wife by spirits and set down in a species of automatic writing, it is actually an occult system of ideas which gave the poet a philosophical framework for many of his poems. … ‘A Vision’ is by no means a frivolous book but a serious attempt to understand and cope with the cultural history of the West. The chapter below details the mechanics and the symbolism of the Wheel.”
All I can say is that reading it makes me want to go read Robert Graves’s “The White Goddess” to cleanse the palate of my mind!
At one point in “The Wheel,” Yeats writes:
“…my mind had been full of [William] Blake from boyhood up and I saw the world is a conflict–Spectre and Emanation–and could distinguish between a contrary and a negation. ‘Contraries are positive,’ wrote Blake, ‘a negative is not a contrary,’ ‘How great the gulf between simplicity and insipidity, ‘ and again, ‘There is a place at the bottom of the graves where contraries are equally true.’ ”
Here is something regarding Blake’s myth-making that I quote from an essay by D. H. Tracy, titled “Bad Ideas” (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/178760):
“Yeats was already fifty when his father John Butler wrote this to him about William Blake:
‘You will remind me that Blake was a mystic. I know that Blake’s poetry is not intelligible without a knowledge of Blake’s mystical doctrines. Yet mysticism was never the substance of his poetry, only its machinery…. The substance of his poetry is himself, revolting and desiring. His mysticism was a make-believe, a sort of working hypothesis as good as another. He could write about it in prose and contentiously assert his belief. When he wrote his poems it dropped into the background, and it did not matter whether you believed it or not, so apart from all creeds was his poetry.’
“Cleanth Brooks would not have put it differently. The father is saying, to put it in our present terms, that Blake is not serious. This galled the son, who had spent his entire career trying to cobble together a mythology that was not make-believe and was more than hypothetical—who wanted, in other words, to be serious. This drive for the sublime sent him, often by way of the ridiculous, to obsession after obsession, no one of which proved entirely satisfactory. His interest in the supernatural folklore of his Mythologies failed to overlap with any interest in actual folk. An enthusiastic apprentice of Madame Blavatsky’s theosophist lodge in London, Yeats was excommunicated because his incessant experiments (like trying to induce certain dreams by placing certain items under a pillow) were causing muttering in the ranks.”
(to be continued)
So what makes Yeats worth reading? Some critics contend (with which I agree) that it is not so much for his ideas, but rather for his felicity of expression, and his ability to convey emotion. As R. P. Blackmur writes in his essay, “The Late Poetry of W. B. Yeats”:
“There is about [The Second Coming] … the immediate conviction of pertinent emotion; the lines are stirring, separately and in their smaller groups, and there is a sensible life in them that makes them seem to combine in the form of an emotion.”
However, Blackmur goes on to write:
“… in this poem [The Second Coming], close inspection will show something questionable about it. It is true that it can be read as it is, isolated from the rest of Yeats’s work and isolated from the intellectual senses: and if we do not know precisely what the familiar words drag after them into the poem, still we know vaguely what the weight of it feels like; and that seems enough to make a poem at one level of response. …”
“Possibly the troubled attention will fasten first upon the italicized phrase in the twelfth line: ‘Spiritus Mundi’; and the question is whether the general and readily available senses of the words are adequate to supply the specific sense wanted by the poem.”
So what does ‘Spiritus Mundi; mean? In John Ciardi’s (and Miller Williams’s) book, “How Does a Poem Mean?” there is a footnote to “The Second Coming”:
” ‘Spiritus Mundi’: The Spirit of the World. Yeats was a believer in a mystical system largely of his own invention. In that system ”Spiritus Mundi’ is the name of a place somewhere between the Earth and Sun. It is there the souls of the dead go.”
It is interesting to note that Yeats, in the “The Great Wheel” chapter of ‘A Vision’, mentions the idea of ‘Mundus Intelligibilis’, the world of intelligible reality or, as Yeats calls it, “spaceless reality.” So this kind of wording was something Yeats was used to employing.
(to be continued)
Larry, thanks for all this excellent information on Yeats. There are several points I’d like to reply to, but they will have to wait until tomorrow. One thing I can add now. The “Second Coming” has always interested me for its word choices. I like to say it aloud. The last two lines are good examples of what I mean. The words have a cadence and cause the reader to speak slowly which adds to the monstrous image.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
The first line of the two lines above are made up of 10 single syllable words, as if the beast is moving at a slow steady pace. And then the word “slouches.” I’m getting the chills already. I hope I don’t have a nightmare!
I agree with you. Yeats knows how to turn a phrase, which is one of his great strengths as a poet. The whole second stanza of the poem, culminating in the lines you quote above, produce in me the emotions of anxiety, dread, awe, and even despair.
However, as has been pointed out by others, it’s some 90-plus years since the poem was written, and Western culture hasn’t experienced the profound Yeatsian gyre / cone / vortex ‘flip’ that the poem suggests was imminent.
Yeats was a great reviser. I have a book, “Yeats at Work,” by Curtis Bradford, which examines Yeats’s methods of revising poems. Unfortunately, this book doesn’t examine “The Second Coming” because, as the author points out, an examination of the revising of that poem through its various drafts has been done by Jon Stallworthy in his book, “Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making.” I have put a request in for this book through the Minuteman Library System, but if I don’t get it by this weekend, I can go to the Boston Public Library where the book is available for in-library use only. Also, there are some examples of revision of this poem to be found in google books online, which I will reference if all else fails.
Larry, I’ll be interested in what you find in “Between the Lines…” One more thing about Yeats’ strange vision of the vortex: there have been many great works created by writers and artists that are based on bad science, mystical math, and other such thinking. Seurat’s pointillist paintings (divisionist) were beautiful even though he was confused about the additive and subtractive theories of light. He misunderstood the science. Seurat expected to achieve more luminosity by placing one color next to another. But of course he got less because he was working with material (pigments) and not light. Still he created masterpieces that resonate with the viewer for a reason beyond the faulty theories he held when he painted them.
P.S. Although I’m not going to do this here, it would be interesting to compare, for potential help in understanding, Yeats’s ‘Spiritus Mundi’ to both Emerson’s idea of the “Oversoul” (influenced by, among others, Plato and Swedenborg), and C. G. Jung’s idea of the “Collective Unconscious” (in terms of the “collective unconscious’s” role in the production of cultural archetypes).
I did read that Yeats came up with the title “The Second Coming” after attending a meeting of the Ghost Society in London and experimenting with automatic writing at which his wife was proficient. I have always liked the W.H. Auden line, “You were silly like us” from “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.” I have always believed that Auden was thinking of Yeats’s spiritual beliefs.
Abigail, I agree on this. And perhaps in the second part of that line: “You were silly like us; your gift survived it all,” Auden is saying that the poets words live on despite the misguided ideas of the poet. And with that, have we buried Yeats?
Some notes on Yeats’s revisions:
According to Jon Stallworthy: “The falcon has long been a problem.” In the earliest preliminary manuscripts, the bird is a ‘hawk’. Apparently the falcon has been a problem because it doesn’t fit in with Yeats’s usual symbolism. It seems to me, however, that being a poet, Yeats realized that, among other considerations, ‘falcon’ simply sounds better in the line than ‘hawk’ does. And it doesn’t change what the line may mean. Also, at one point in revision, Yeats has the line “Surely the great falcon must come”. Stallworthy suggests that this line was in reference to Yeats’s cyclic view of cultural history. The beginning of one cycle (the age of heroes) was announced by Zeus descending as a swan on Leda. The next cycle was announced by the dove of the Holy Spirit coming to the Virgin. Stallworthy suggests that at one point Yeats saw the “predatory falcon” as inaugurating a new cycle.
One of the things that Yeats did as he worked on the poem was eliminate references to specific events of the time he lived in, and made the poem more timelessly generalized. So references to “Burke” and “Pitt,” and “the germans are (…..) now to Russia come” (a reference to the crumbling eastern front in WWI) are eliminated. It is also clear from the preliminary manuscripts that Yeats at one time had the idea of the poem being rhymed.
What does “The ceremony of innocence is drowned” mean? In early manuscripts, Yeats has this line: “Though every day some innocent has died.” Stallworthy suggests that Yeats may have had the fate of the Russian Royal House in mind. “The ceremony of innocence” has also been seen in light of a later poem from the same year, “A Prayer for My Daughter,” in which the following lines appear: “How but in custom and in ceremony / Are innocence and beauty born?” But for me, “the ceremony of innocence is drowned” is too opaque in meaning in the poem for me to feel something when I read it, or nod my head in agreement. It sounds good but signifies nothing meaningful. I am always stopped at that point by the question, “What does THAT mean????”
In describing the sphinx-like “shape moving,” Yeats at one point had “feet’ instead of “thighs”. Stallworthy suggests that part of the change to “thighs” may have been sub-consciously influenced by Shelley’s “Ozymandius” (“Tow vast and trunkless legs…”).
Another suggested inspiration from Shelley for the lines “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” are the lines from Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound” (lines 625-8):
The good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The powerful goodness want; worse need for them.
The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill.
The poem originally had “thirty centuries of stony sleep” which were reduced to “twenty centuries.” One critic points out that the phrase “stony sleep” may have been unconsciously borrowed from Blake’s lines in “The First Book of Urizen”:
Ages and ages roll’d over him
In stony sleep ages roll’d over him.
In my opinion, one thing that makes Yeats a great poet is his rigorous revisioning. When I read some of the earlier versions of lines that Yeats wrote in manuscript for this poem, I wonder how many contemporary poets would have been satisfied with those lines, and would feel that no further revision was necessary.
Enough by me on Yeats. Here are my suggestions for some poems regarding “circles.”
There is of course Frost’s great little poem:
The Secret Sits
We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
There is also a poem by Howard Nemerov, “Lines & Circularities” (rather long, so I found a copy online, but with a few typos):
http://inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com/2008/02/607-lines-circularities-howard-nemerov.html
This is a poem that plays with the idea that time can be both linear and circular (meaning repeatable). It uses the extended metaphor, now outdated, of a vinly record being played on a turntable. In my opinion it’s a rather messy poem in some ways, but I was much impressed by it when I first read it.
And finally, a poem by Richard Wilbur that is rather dense and cryptic:
O
The idle dayseye, the laborious wheel,
The osprey’s tours, the pointblank matin sun
Sanctified first the circle; thence for fun
Doctors deduced a shape, which some called real
(So all games spoil), a shape of spare appeal,
Cryptic and clean, and endlessly spinning unspun.
Now I go backward, filling by one and one
Circles with hickory spokes and rich soft shields
Of petalled dayseyes, with herechastening steel
Volleys of daylight, writhing white looks of sun;
And I toss circles skyward to be undone
By actual wings, for wanting this repeal
I should go whirling a thin Euclidean reel,
No hawk or hickory to true my run.
When I was in high school in Lexington, MA, Howard Nemerov lived across the street from me. I have nothing to add about that except when I got older and read about him as a poet, I wondered why I hadn’t paid any attention to him then. I only remember that my mother had pointed him out to me at the A&P saying how good looking he was.
When Howard Nemerov wrote an essay on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Eliot responded by thanking Nemerov for helping to explain the poem to him. I always tell my students about this because it helps explain the fact that poets don’t always know what they are doing. There is much more in a poem than the poet is conscious of. Yeats’s poem improved by his changing the specific for the general and Eliot’s epic poem was greatly improved by Pound’s editing, or so I am told. I am not enough of an expert to know for myself.
What an interesting family it must have been that Mr. Nemerov grew up in. His sister was the noted photographer Diane (Nemerov) Arbus (at one time the wife for a while of the recently deceased actor Allan Arbus).
One more Yeats thought: One thing that makes the language of the poem so pleasant to say, both outloud and silently to oneself, as far as I’m concerned, is the occurrence of ‘r-controlled vowels’ throughout the poem, making kind of an internal, slant-rhyme assonance, especially in the first four lines:
Turning, turning, gyre
hear, falconer
apart, centre,
mere, anarchy, world
However, perhaps this is a typical occurrence of ‘r-controlled vowels’ to be found in any English-language poem of this length, and thus not out-of-the-ordinary in this poem.
I almost forgot one of my favorite lines of poetry, in a poem by Theodore Roethke, “I Knew a Woman.” The line is:
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172104
My wife calls my liking for this line a “guy thing.” LOL
I forgot to include a link to an interesting essay about “The Second Coming,” written by Patrick J. Keane, titled “Eternal Recurrence: The Permanent Relevance of William Butler Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’.” Keane is referenced in Stallwrothy’s book, “Between the Lines.”
The essay spends a lot of time showing how quotable a number of lines from Yeats’s poem have been right up to the present day, and spends a lot of time showing how a number of thinkers think the world is in a bad situation right now, and how Yeats’s closing question has always seemed immanent since the poem was written right up to the present day.. But the essay does reproduce some manuscript pages of Yeats’s drafts for the poem, and discusses what may be deducible of Yeats’s intentions. For anyone seriously interested in a comprehensive examination of this poem, this essay is well worth reading.