'The Waste Land'

Hello readers, I'm writing this blog as an assignment given by the Department of English, MKBU. Here, I'm trying to analyse the modern epic poem of T.S.Eliot 'The Waste Land'.

 T.S.Eliot:

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S, and died on January 4, 1965, London, England. He was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the 1920s until late in the century. His experiments in diction, style, and versification revitalized English poetry, and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected new ones. The publication of Four Quartets led to his recognition as the greatest living English poet and man of letters, and in 1948 he was awarded both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

Introduction to the Poem:

In the writing of the poem 'The Waste Land' Eliot was influenced by Jessie Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance (1919) which supplied him with the legend of the Grail and the Fisher King. He was impressed by James Frazer’s book The Golden Bough (1890) which provided him with the knowledge of a number of vegetation and fertility myths and rituals, especially those connected with Attis, Adonis and Osiris. The waste Land of King Fisher, the waste land of King Oedipus of Thebes and the Biblical waste land provided a solid foundation for the wasteland of Eliot.

This modern epic is divided in five parts:

1.The Burial of the Dead

2.A Game of Chess

3.The Fire Sermon

4.Death by Water

5.What the Thunder Said

Central Theme of 'The Waste Land':

Death Fear:

In 'The Waste Land' violence against the body is the one which is depicted or referred to most often. This is so because coition is the source of life and of death and is therefore the source of consciousness that man is "nothing but a body as far as nature is concerned." Equating sex and generation with death and inferiority, as Eliot's people do, produces a static compromise existence in which they live as though dead and thus avoid both life and death.

Apathy and Incest Fixation:

Apathy has been described as a retreat into the self, the barren land of the uncommitted life, in a flight from humanness and death. There are two psychological elements of apathy: narcissism and oedipal fixation. The Waste Land criticism holds that Eliot mentions Coriolanus, near the end of the poem, to emphasize the destructive effects of narcissism. While bringing the thunder's message of life to the dead land, Eliot comments here and, in a sense, interprets this message by describing narcissism. The poem clearly shows that narcissism is a state of apathy in which one feels "empty, fragmented, missing a piece, help- less and hopeless, filled with rage, inert."

Incest fixation is a major theme of The Waste Land. Sophocles Tiresias in the poem implies that the secret illness of the land has to do with the wrong kind of love, incestuous, murderous love. Because Tiresias is the presiding intelligence of the poem and is, as Eliot's note says, "the most important personage in the poem," his knowledge of the secret disease of incest is most significant. The incest theme exists not only in the implied reference to Oedipus. It is elaborated in the references to Hamlet and to Tereus' rape of his sister-in-law, Philomel, whose story is carved above the antique mantel of the narcissistic lady of fashion. 

Sexual Perversion:

Eliot cites the instances of guilty love in the first section of the poem with reference to Waqner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. Then he goes to another guilty love of the hyacinth girl.

In the section of Game of Chess we are introduced to sexual violation in high-class society where a lustful duke seduces a young married-woman. Sex also prevails among the lower class of society. Eliot mentions the story of Lil and the experience of three daughters of Thames. Another example is that of the mechanical sex relation between the typist girl and her boyfriend. A homosexual relation is exemplified by Mr. Eugenides. Eliot sums up the story of European lust through the words of St. Augustine.

Spiritual Degradation:

Perverted sensuality has depraved the human mind severely. Now man cannot think acutely. He is now spiritually barren. As a consequence, he has renounced religion and welcomed secularism. Excessive love sickness has made him insensible and narcissistic. He doesn’t feel any urge to revitalize his spiritual life. As a result, the emergence of April (the month of regeneration and rebirth) doesn’t stimulate his conscience or even make him happy. To him April is cruel because it reminds him of his spiritual decay and makes him think of regeneration. He likes Winter, the month of death and decay because during this period he feels free to enjoy all sorts of animal passions.

Points to ponder:

As per my understanding, I try to give responses on the points to ponder which are mentioned here in the blog of Dilip Barad sir. 

https://blog.dilipbarad.com/2014/10/presentations-on-ts-eliots-waste-land.html?m=1

1)T.S.Eliot and Friedrich Nietzsche:

The above phrase is tell that the time is always changing or a progressive. The time is always dynamic , not static.The growth of society is always like climbing the mountain. If we want to reach at top we have to keep moving on. 

Yes I believe that Eliot’s idea of going back to Holy scriptures for finding solution of present malaises is regressive. 

Frederic Nietzsche was a German philosopher who gave the term ' Übermensch', which means the ideal superior man of the future who could rise above conventional Christian morality to create and impose his own values, originally described by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra.

For example Siddharth who was born in royal family and then left his home in pursuit of knowledge known as 'Mahabhinishkraman'. He lived in the 5th-century BC. He was a normal human being and has practiced intense meditation. Though he was not god but was having superhuman quality as compared to other humans. Then he becomes leader in Buddhism but with passing of time he was considered as god.

Eliot is regressive as compared to Nietzsche, he have used many myth in his poem waste land, there is nothing wrong in being regressive because people learns from past. If people have done something wrong in past they can recover or learns not to repeat same thing in present. Eliot gave example of myth in the context of present.

Eliot, conversely, argued that early twentieth-century Anglo-American culture suffered precisely from its lack of tradition: without a strong sense of history, young artists were deprived of a fertile, nurturing soil on which to flourish. Despite the oppositional polemics of the two essays, then, both circle around the same dilemma: how to break out of a contemporary crisis of creativity and locate a space for originality within tradition. Nietzsche criticizes history in the name of "life", Eliot tempers Romantic impulses in order to nurture and shape tradition. In the end, both writers find themselves negotiating the same area of temporal contradiction, where the apparent duality between "modernity" and "history", "present" and "past" blurs. Modernity discovers its inherent ambiguity, and both writers, approaching from different directions, confront paradox.

This opposition, centered on the concept of "history," begins to dissolve when "history" proves to be closer to its opposite than both writers had admitted in their confrontational openings. For Eliot, "the historical sense" denotes not merely an understanding of history as that which occurred in the past, but also a sense of history as presence, "the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.

2)T.S.Eliot and Sigmund Freud:

Sigmund Freud believed in individuality and talked about "primitive instinct" whereas Eliot believed in preservation of cultural traditions which means all together. 

Freud wrote that for progress any individual primitive instinct was needed but in order to preserve tradition Eliot says that there is need for it to grew together.

Culture demands that individuals suppress their urges, especially sexuality and aggression. With the help of the superego, the moral authority within, man directs his aggression against himself and has his behavior under control. This suppression makes people unhappy and causes neurosis. In The Discontent in Culture, Freud processed the experiences of the First World War and the post-war period. Accordingly, the work is strongly culturally pessimistic, Freud opposes an artless belief in progress. For him, people are not free in their decisions, but are primarily controlled by their instincts. Freud's theories and the psychoanalysis he developed had an enormous influence on intellectual life in the 20th century. 

The Waste Land is best read against the Freudian background it invokes and resists. Eliot's identification with the all-knowing but understanding. Tiresias should be seen as a refutation of Freud's Oedipal reading. The Waste Land further resists a psychoanalytic interpretation by depicting the poet as the self-conscious organizer of the poem's symptomatic fragments, particularly in the 'notes' which gesture toward the interpretive systems which Eliot espoused and act as a preemptive strike against inevitable Freudian interpretations. In addition, The Waste Land's hyper- allusivity burlesque psychoanalytic reliance on the telling allusion and argues for the literary critic rather than the psychoanalyst as The Waste Land's authoritative interpreter. The Waste Land's indeterminacy enacts Eliot's skepticism about Freudian conceptions of cultural inheritance and analytic interpretation. 

3)Allusions to the Indian thoughts in 'The Waste Land'. 

The Fire Sermon:

Here Eliot gave the same name to the third part of his poem. The whole poem describes the theme of sexual perversion and by referring to this sermon of Buddha because he also wants to convey a message to stay detached from all the senses.

 River Ganga and Himalaya:

"Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant."

River Ganga is known for its purity and also for purification. While Himalaya is known for spirituality and peace. Eliot finds the solution of all contemporary problems in spirituality. That is the reason he refers to Ganga and Himalaya here.

The Thunder:

In Upanishad the Prajapati spoke the message of salvation through thunder which was called “Akashvani”. Here Eliot also gives reference to Thunder to convey that now the solution of all problems will be given by Thunder, that is the reason he gave name to his 5th part of poem “What the Thunder Said”.

Three Da:

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

DA

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

DA

Damyata: The boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam uti chelidon — O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih

These three Da are spoken by Thunder. Which means this is the way of salvation. The first Da “Datta'' means to give. Give sacrifice for others, and help each other. The second Da “Dayadhvam '' means sympathize and empathize with others. Third Da “Damyata '' means self control, control over the senses. According to Eliot this is the way one could get salvation.

  

Shantih mantra:

The Shantih mantra is for inner peace, peace that passes understanding. Eliot ends his poem with this mantra and with hope. The hope of re-birth, end of modern malaises, and growth of spirituality. To show the hope he ends this poem with Shantih mantra. 

4)'The Waste Land' as a Pandemic Poem:

'Viral Modernism' is an elegantly written, penetrating study of how the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 shaped modernist literature and society, most notably in Clarissa’s illnesses in Mrs. Dalloway; the burning thirst and drowning in The Waste Land. 

The voices that surface through the exquisite readings of this well-researched, well-argued study offer insight not only into the tragic experience of this devastating disease but also into how those affected use literary and cultural forms to make sense of that experience, hence into the nature of storytelling itself. 

This was personal for Eliot, he and his wife had both been seriously ill during the flu pandemic, and it had left them anxious and enervated. Some of the depictions of marital discontent in the poem, especially in the section titled “A Game of Chess,” portray not only an unhappy couple but an unhappy couple weakened by illness, trapped together in a miserable fever dream. In 'Viral Modernism' by Elizabeth Outka, explores the influence of the pandemic on Eliot’s work, especially on the aesthetics of fragmentation and themes of hallucination and thirst. He frequently employs images of bodily distortion and mental delirium. 

Thus, The influence of the 1918 "Spanish flu" pandemic can be seen in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". Eliot's The Waste Land, written in 1922, three years after Eliot and his wife caught and recovered from influenza. 1918-1919 strain of influenza often left its survivors with mental and nervous aftereffects, and that Eliot himself remarked that his mind did not seem right. 

Word count: 2350

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Hello readers, I'm writing this blog as an assignment given by the Department of English, MKBU. Here, I'm trying to analyse the character of Robert Jordan as a typical Hemingway's hero.

Ernest Hemingway:

Ernest Miller Hemingway born on July 21, 1899, Cicero Illinois, U.S. and died on July 2, 1961, Ketchum, Idaho. He was an American novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life. His succinct and lucid prose style exerted a powerful influence on American and British fiction in the 20th century. 

Notable Works:

“A Clean Well-Lighted Place” 

“A Farewell to Arms” 

“A Moveable Feast”

“Across the River and Into the Trees”

“Death in the Afternoon” 

“For Whom the Bell Tolls”

“Green Hills of Africa” 

“Hills like White Elephants”

“In Our Time” 

“Islands in the Stream”

“The Fifth Column” 

“The Old Man and the Sea” 

“The Short Happy Life of Francis  Macomber” 

“The Snows of Kilimanjaro” 

“The Sun Also Rises” 

“To Have and Have Not” 

Robert Jordan as a typical Hemingway's hero:

Robert Jordan As A Typical Hemingway Hero In ” For Whom The Bell Tolls”. Hemingway’s heroes have their own brand of uniqueness in their characterization. They are not less than Shakespeare heroes in their unique traits of heroism. 

Hemingway’ writings because his heroes often fail in their struggle and get nothing in the end. Santiago in The Old man and the Sea, Romero in The Sun also Rises and Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls can be best quoted in this regard. 

In For Whom the Bell Tolls, we see that Robert Jordan plays the role of such a character who fights for an ideal in a foreign land. He has a firm belief in the Republican cause because he loves Spain. He is of the view that if there establishes a government of fascists in Spain then the future of this country will be in danger and the country might be spoiled. Moreover, he thinks that in spite of all its flaws a republican form of Govt. It is better than a totalitarian state because an individual feels cramped and suffocated under fascism.

Robert Jordan is shown from the beginning of the narrative as one who feels strongly about trusting those with whom he works. And he tells Pablo on first meeting him that he comes only for duty, regardless of orders that may appear bad. When he and Anselmo later go to eye the bridge, his duty is uppermost in his thoughts.

His real concern for duty is to be tested soon. He sensed it earlier in his first meeting with Pablo, and that ominous thought bears fruit later when Pablo, assuming continued leadership of the mountain group, challenges the order to blow the bridge. Pilar's response "I am for the bridge" encourages Jordan's knowledge that he is communicating because he knows Pilar is the true leader now, and her challenge to Pablo assures him that the goal of blowing the bridge is a common one. It binds them into a community on a mission of salvation. As Pilar says,

 "I am for the Republic. And the Republic is the bridge." 

Jordan's concern with the cause is definite all the while. That is to him the only concern. When Rafael questions him about allowing Pablo to live, Jordan assures us of his humaneness and his dedication to the task.

This novel has been written in order to test the quality of Jordan’s idealism and the chain of obstacles in his path forms the basic structure of the novel. As the action of the novel proceeds, Jordan’s task gets more and more complicated. Pablo is absolutely against Jordan’s plan. He takes it impossible to put into practice because it means the destruction of the land. Hemingway’s heroes are always brave in their acts. Jordan is brave enough that he does not even feel fear in his great risky task of blowing up the bridge.

The reason being, Hemingway’s heroes always like to face risks like Santiago in The Old man and the Sea, Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms and Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Jordan is such a character who does not give any importance to what happens to himself. He accepts the risky task of blowing up the bridge with an open heart and never shows any sign of cowardice.

Though General Golz warns him about the difficulty of the assignment yet he gives a promise to complete it within the limit of time. In spit of creating obstacles by Pablo, he balances Pablo’s hostility by Pilar’s support. It was being assumed by some critics that Jordan’s falling in love with Maria might become a threat or obstacle in fulfilling his mission. In spite of this, he does not care and we see with the passage of time that it is his love for Maria which enhances his zest. He keeps the two roles that of lover and that of a dynamiter apart, though towards the end of the play, they merge into one another.

Some critics raise objections by saying that sometimes, Jordan appears like a dummy but Hemingway makes him a convincing and imitable personality by his superb art of characterization. So, their objection does not remain for a long time when we see that it is Jordan who fights against many abstractions: liberty, equality, rights of the people, democracy and atrocities of the fascists.

In fact, he is a religious zealous who fights for a secular ideal. He sacrifices for all the poor people in the world. There is no doubt in saying the fact that his ideals are worth imitating for the people of the rest of the world. He fights for those ideals which are practicable for most sensible persons.

His love for Maria is a weakness in his character. But it is very convincing because of his weakness as a human being. His love for Maria is pure and genuine because he loves her by the cores of his heart unlike a boozer or a womanizer. He wants to remain in her heart forever. 

It is worthy to note here that the influence of his father’s profession is very much in his life. His father was a guerrilla in the American civil war, as he is in the Spanish. Just like an ordinary human being, he is totally dominated by Maria’s love. Here we should not forget that he is an ordinary human being and not a supernatural creature or perfect human being. He has a lot of weak points like ordinary and commonplace human beings. He is an American volunteer who fights for the genuine cause of humanity and feels this crusade in his blood and soul. Being dutiful, he loves Spain. He remained there when the civil war broke up. He joined the war inorder to contribute his service for the welfare of the country.

There is no doubt in saying that he becomes a new man after the arrival of Maria in his love and he starts living only for Maria’s sake but it does not mean that his sense of Dutifulness eclipses at any cost. His love for Maria and his risky mission of blowing up the bridge becomes one because fascists have now become his personal revenge for him as they rape his sweetheart. This very thinking of him leads him further to his fight for Republicans and Republic Spain and Maria becomes one for him. 

Summing up the above mentioned discussion, we can say in the concluding remarks that at the end; his loyalty becomes personal loyalty and he is just a husband covering the retreat of his wife whom he loves by the cores of his heart. He sacrifices his life for Maria and her people i.e., Pablo and his land. He is justified in his act of sacrifice because his idealism is worth imitating and practicable for many others.

Citation:

CRAWFORD, JOHN W. “ROBERT JORDAN: A MAN FOR OUR TIMES.” CEA Critic, vol. 41, no. 3, 1979, pp. 17–22. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44378747. Accessed 25 Dec. 2022.

“For Whom the Bell Tolls; Analysis of Robert Jordan's Character.” YouTube, 31 May 2021, https://youtu.be/orLgE37yn3I. 

Word Count: 1378

On Yeats's Poems

 Hello readers, I'm writing this blog as an assignment given by the Department of English, MKBU. Here, I'm trying to analyse the poems of W.B.Yeats "The Second Coming" and "On Being Asked for a War Poem" 

William Butler Yeats:

W.B.Yeats was born on 13 June1865 in Sandymount, Dublin, Ireland and died on 28 January 1939 in Roquebrune-CapMartin, France. He was an Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer. He is considered as one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. 

Notable Works: 

“A Vision” 

“At the Hawk’s Well” 

“Cathleen ni Houlihan” 

“Easter 1916” 

“Four Plays for Dancers” 

“Last Poems and Two Plays” 

“Leda and the Swan” 

“The Green Helmet” 

“The Second Coming” 

“The Tower” 

“The Wild Swans at Coole"

1. The Second Coming:

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?

Analysis of the poem 'The Second Coming':

"The Second Coming" is a poem by William Butler Yeats from 1919. Yeats's famous poem "The Second Coming" is concerned with an ending and a beginning, both of them so interfused that it is scarcely possible to say where the distinction between them can be found. The phrase "The Second Coming" has just been completed for the second time when the action of that coming commences with the "vast image". Indeed these first eleven lines have several repeated words and phrases: "Turning and turning", "falcon/falconer", "loosed", "surely", "at hand".

 Further, the definite article, used eleven times, is strategically important in the establishment of the pattern of repetition. It insinuates a complicity with the reader, a knowingness. 

We can specify what the falcon, the tide, the ceremony, the best, the worst are because the surrounding poems of the volume Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) tell us. In the vicinity of "The Second Coming", poems like:

"The Leaders of the Crowd"

"Towards Break of Day"

"Demon and Beast"

"A Prayer for my Daughter"

"A Meditation in Time of War"

"To be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee" 

provide a narrative sequence of which "The Second Coming" is an integral part. They help us to know what "the ceremony of innocence", "the worst" and all other agents and conditions of the poem's action are. As is always the case, a Yeats poem is, in a sense, a quotation from the volume in which it appears. "The Second Coming" is reputedly about the Russian Revolution of 1917. It takes the usual Yeatsian form of a collision between opposites out of which might come unity or, more likely and less heroically, release from the trial of strength between them into a limp, exhausted freedom. The second coming is a rerun of the first, not an analogue for the biblical Second Coming. It is, in a very specific sense, like the Beast of Revelation, an Anti-Christ, a reverse image of the First Coming but not a prelude to the Second.

The manner of the Beast's going is important. But it has already come to life; in what sense then will it be born or born again? Will it be reborn as the thing it is, or will it be reborn as something different? It would seem that this nightmarish vision can only be known for what it is when it is interpreted, when the Christianity oppressed, suppressed or repressed demonic energies that have now gone bad. This peculiar version of the second coming may, after all, have its redemptive component within it because the therapeutic moment has arrived. The unconscious has finally spoken. The phrase that, in Christian belief, signaled the end of human history, has precipitated the beginning of another phase, one dominated by those very energies that had been hitherto occluded. It is a very potent question after all what this Rough Beast is or what it will become when it reaches Bethlehem, its symbolic place, to be born again in the human imagination. 

Between the idea of a second "coming" and that of a second "birth", the poem reveals its conflict. There is a welcome given to the male coming, to its brute strength, its renewable energy, its destructive power. But there is also a horror at the consequences of its emergence, the suffering of the female figure who is represented only by contextual reference and echo and yet who is the reigning figure over "the ceremony of innocence" celebrated in the succeeding poem, "A Prayer for my Daughter". 

Yeats made the opening poems of the volume, a dialogue between a "He" and a "She". In this instance, it is the second stanza, the born-again sonnet, that would be spoken by the "She". However, the central point is that the vision of history and the vision of love relationships, both of which are part of Yeats's preoccupation in this book of poems, are superimposed one upon the other in "The Second Coming" and that Yeats's contradictory emotions of horror and welcome are ultimately visible in the poem's inner dialogue between a highly present male voice and an almost wholly concealed female one.

"The Second Coming" is a poem that produces both narratives simultaneously. It is about the return of barbarism and about the return of the lost energies of the occult. The poem is itself lacking all conviction and full of passionate intensity. The Beast's hour has come round at last and this is a matter for celebration. But it is also ravening beast that threatens violation and endless monstrosity Caught between two value systems, Yeats represents one as male, the other as female, one as triumphant, the other as horrified, imbricating into the form of the poem itself the ironic admission that the best that can be said is second-best.

2. On Being Asked for a War Poem:

I think it better that in times like these

A poet'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.

Analysis of the Poem ‘On Being Asked For a War Poem’: 

This poem was written after Yeats was asked to write a war poem. It is a meditation on whether poets can write war poetry. It also considers an old question: what is the role of the poet in society, and what is the function of poetry? An ancient philosopher, Plato, even thought that poetry should be banned as corrupting to society. Yeats here enters this long-standing argument in the modern age.

    “I think it better that in times like these a poet’s mouth be silent”

 The opening statement is forthright and conversational about “times like these”, or times of war, the enjambment, or running over the end of line, mimics everyday speech. When the poet writes of “a poet’s mouth” being silent, he is using a technique called metonymy. Like metaphor, metonymy substitutes one thing for another. Metaphor does this by contrasting different things but in metonymy, something closely related to something else is substituted. For example: “the crown” may refer to the Queen or royalty, or “the press” may refer to the newspapers. Both are closely connected. Here, the “poet’s mouth” represents his poetry.

    “We have no gift to set a statesman right;” 

A statesman is a political leader. Here, it is asserted that poets have no “gift”, or ability, to tell statesmen how they should make decisions. This seems to say that poetry has no place in intervening in politics, and the poet has no role in making big statements about wars and what causes them. 

“meddling”: Another word for interfering. This keyword in the poem gives us a hint of the poet’s attitude to those who try and write activist or political poems, they are ‘meddlers’, troublesome interferers. The tone is obviously negative. “Meddling” in the lives of old men and young girls carries a lighter and happier tone however a sense of play.

  “He has had enough of meddling who can please a young girl in the indolence of her youth”

A quick change in imagery and reference point, from the macrocosm to the microcosm, from the world of politics to the world of intimate acquaintances. The new scene is lazy (“indolence”), relaxed, one of beauty (“youth”) and innocence.

      “an old man on a winter’s night”

This completes the scope of the poet’s influence. Does this mean that poetry is suited to everyday lessons and life? That the poet’s role is to appeal to beauty and wisdom, youth and age? These certainly seem narrower limits to the role of poetry than ‘setting statesmen right’. Yeats, however, would surely argue that poetry’s concerns are higher than political contingency.

Symbolism in W.B.Yeats's poems:

Some poetry critics and most readers who are a bit confused by W. B. Yeats' poems would call him the "master of symbolism." He uses the mechanisms of poetry-rhythm, rhyme, and meter along with the use of both emotional and intellectual symbols to express emotion and higher meaning in a usually short and concise length of words. His theories on rhythm and use of symbols are evident in his work, especially in such pieces as "The Second Coming," "The Valley of the Black Pig," and "No Second Troy," and Yeats' feelings toward emotion and the symbols and words that invoke them make both he and his work unique.

For example, Yeats' poem "The Second Coming;" in this poem there are the symbols gyre, falcon and falconer, lion body, rocking cradle, and Bethlehem, just to name a few. Each of these is an intellectual symbol, and, depending on the person's individual knowledge, can be interpreted differently and some are only linked to one thing, such as Bethlehem, which can only be linked to the city of the same name and specific historical or religious meaning.

Surrealism and Yeats:

Of all the radical aspects of Modernism, Surrealism came closest to touching Yeats. By the early 1920s the disintegrating force of Dada had reached such a pitch that it managed to disintegrate itself, and from its orts and scraps André Breton cobbled together a movement which he called, borrowing a term that Apollinaire had coined in 1917, Surrealism.

Surrealism can be conceived as a pyschologizing of Dada, in that it displaced the locus of random from the exterior universe to the human mind. As Breton defined it in the Surrealist Manifesto, "Surrealism". Pure psychic automatism Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason.

Breton experimented with methods for hearing the inspired voice, the dictation of the unconscious, by cultivating states of trance, waiting, at last transcribing the mysterious words and images that appeared.

Breton gave a famous example of words that knocked at the window" of his mind: "There is a man cut in two by the window " it was accompanied by a feeble visual representation of a walking man sliced halfway up by a window perpendicular to this axis of his body, Breton's automatism had the cachet of Freud and the literary avant-garde.

But Yeats was pursuing a surprisingly similar automatism, under the far less reputable acgis of occult research. Yeats records in his autobiography some of his sessions with Macgregor Mathers, a quixotic, war-obsessed visionary: when Yeats closed his eyes and Mathers held a cardboard symbol to Yeats's head, "there arose before me mental images that I could not control: a desert and black Titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap of ancient ruins. Mathers explained that I had seen a being of the order of Salamanders because he had shown me their symbol". In this light. Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" (1920) looks like a transcript of an automatic process of image evocation, the poet empties his mind until it becomes a tabula rasa: then in the blank desert there appear complicated intraocular effects ("Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds") and in the center a vision, more virtual than actual, of a sphinx- Antichrist, slouching towards Bethlehem to be bom.

Breton sought what he called convulsive beauty, and Yeats's poems often record both images of terrible beauty and the processes of imaginative convulsion that bring them into being.

Citation:

Deane, Seamus. “‘The Second Coming’: Coming Second; Coming in a Second.” Irish University Review, vol. 22, no. 1, 1992, pp. 92–100. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484467. Accessed 15 Dec. 2022.

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