Thinking Activity: The Second Coming by W.B.Yeats

 Hello Beautiful People,

    I am Riddhi Bhatt. You know...what is today's blog ?This blog is about W B Yeats - Poems giving. As a part of the syllabus, students of English department are learning the paper called The Twentieth Century Literature: 1900 to World War II (paper-106).Our professor Dr. Dilip Barad sir discussed this unit and assigned us one of the most creative tasks to explain that Yeats poem 'The Second Coming as Pandemic Poem'. Here first we know some brief introductions about W B Yeats.

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Throughout his long literary career, Yeats continued to mature and grow like an artisan, and this the most admirable thing about Yeats. His poetry is characterized by the dreamy flourishing style dull of lulling rhythms. … He started using brief and terse diction, and consequently, his poetry matured in density.

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 intensityI.

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 Second Coming” as a Pandemic Poem :

“The Second Coming” is an allegorical poem that W. B. Yeats penned in 1919 and published in The Dial in 1920. The poem describes a declining, violent present and an impending apocalyptic future, marked by the approach of a sphinxlike monster. The poem is often considered an allegory for the fraught times Yeats was living in—namely, the end of World War I, the midst of the Spanish flu pandemic, and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence. More broadly, some scholars believe the poem bemoans the devolution of Europe and European culture.

“The Second Coming” is also indicative of Yeats’s interest in the occult. Yeats and his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, believed in a universal spirit world which they contacted for artistic inspiration. Yeats references this spirit world in “The Second Coming” (Spiritus Mundi). He frequently used “automatic writing,”

The poem opens to the image of a falcon flying in a spiral, or “gyre,” that keeps widening, but the falcon can’t hear its master, the falconer. The rest of the lines in the first stanza Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; We can say that Yeats's poem was published in November 1920. And over the century since, perhaps no poem has been more invoked for vexing times, to convey,

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.

 examine the decaying state of the world: anarchy prevails, blood flows like a tide, and blood drowns all semblance of innocence. The surviving good people lack all conviction, and the “worst” people are excited and ambitious. Just as the speaker makes his prediction, he sees a disturbing image from Spiritus Mundi, the spiritual, universal consciousness: a sphinxlike shape with a lion’s body and a man’s head somewhere in a desert. The sphinx has a vacant, merciless expression and moves slowly, rousing desert birds.

In the ending of poem the speaker can no longer see the image, but he realizes that after 20 centuries of calm, a rocking cradle has turned the world into a nightmare. The speaker ends the last two lines with a question: What is this monster? As he asks, the monster “slouches” to Bethlehem to be born. His wife caught the virus and was very close to death. The highest death rates of the 1918–19 pandemic were among pregnant women—in some areas, it was an up to 70 percent death rate for these women.So here we found this poem as pandemic.It was a very terrible situation as we are facing today because of CORONA pandemic.To conclude we can say that the poem 'The Second Coming' is a Pandemic Poem.

Here I putting a video of our class discussion poem ' The Second Coming' :

THANK YOU....