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:
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"
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.
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.
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.
Word Count: 2160
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