The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;" ~William Butler Yeats

Today I read The Second Coming, by William Butler Yeats, in preparation for digging into Things Fall Apart. You can access the poem here.  My thoughts are in no particular order.

Love those Glasses!

• The speaker is very pessimistic and things of himself as a poet/prophet.
• The setting for this poem is Post-WWI Europe. The rest of Europe is looking at their world and thinking that things are going to get better, but nope, this speaker doesn't think so.
• The first and second stanzas are very different. In style and content.
• A gyre is a ring, or circle, or a circular course or motion.
• Mere could mean only, but it could also mean total.
• Reel could be to wind or unwind, or a cylinder frame, but I believe that the reel of the birds in the second stanza mirrors that of the falcon's "widening gyre."
• Things sound awful in stanza one: anarchy, blood-dimmed tide, innocence is drowned. There is also a lot of water imagery which perhaps suggests an allusion to Noah's flood.
• Man, Yeats! What a pleasantly uplifting poem. I will be interested to look for connections between the poem and Things Fall Apart.
• There is a ton of biblical allusions going on in this poem.
• Spiritus Mundi = spirit of the world
• Our poet/prophet is having vision in the second stanza:
• He sees a sphinx (lion body/head of a man) out in the desert. The sphinx's gaze is "blank and pitiless." It is moving very slowly and birds are circling overhead. Those birds made me think of vultures circling a corpse. Maybe the corpse of Europe? Maybe the corpse of humanity?
• Then he sees a rough beast slouching its way towards Bethlehem to be born. This beast may be the sphinx, but it may be another beast. Seems our poet/prophet does not think things will be coming up all roses after World War I. And while he could not know this, things didn't really turn out so great for Europe. WWII was a mess: Hitler, Fascism, the atomic bomb...etc.
• Although, rough might just mean that the beast is going to give us what we deserve.
• Overall, this poem has a very dark vision of the future. Whether the speaker is staying within the time period, or expanding into even our day, I think we can all admit that not everything is wonderful and peachy in the world. We live in this bleak future and must deal with the choices of humanity.