How Does Yeats’ Poem The Second Coming Reflect the Concerns and Anxieties of the Modernist Movement?
W.B. Yeats’ poem The Second Coming has Coming has been seen as an exemplar of Modernist zeitgeist literature (Hone, 1962, Bradbury, Tratner, 1995, etc) at once depicting the decentring and internal fissure of Twentieth Century culture and elegising the parting of a classical psychosocial period.1 Both linguistically and thematically it represents the gradual erosion of one form of social order in favour of another:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre The Flacon cannot hear the falconer.” (Yeats, 1978:210)
Here Yeats invokes the image of o f the mandala, the circular evolution of the social that finds echoes in Joyce2, Eliot3 and concepts such as Nietzsche’s “eternal return”. In language that, in itself repeats and returns, the poet interweaves images of centrifugal rupture suggesting that the failure in the contemporary system is contained in, not so much the large structures (of thought, of language, of ethics etc) but the psychosocial cohesion that binds them together:
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Yeats, 1978:211)
1 “The Second Coming" traces the process of a "bloody, arrogant power" emerging out of mass movements and shows the role of the poet in this process.” (Tratner, 1995:155) 2 James Joyce, Finnegan’s Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake Wake,, (Penguin, 1992) 3 For instance, the Four the Four Quartets
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This is a point bourn out in Harold Bloom’s study:
“Yeats's poem then is about the second birth of Urizen or the Egyptian Sphinx, but in a context of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence” (Bloom, 1972:319)
As Bloom goes on to say, in its prophetic and visionary overtones, The Second Coming reflects not only Blake, through its redefinition of biblical and Christian tropes and symbols but also Shelley, through its’ affirmation of the poetic experience and its place in psychosocial change. For Shelly as for Yeats, the poet has a vital role to play in tracing the social environment and highlighting its incongruities.4
At it heart, I think, Yeats’ poem concerns itself with a similar poetic theme to Eliot’s The Waste Land , that Hugh Kenner refers in to in The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot , as “the death of Europe” (Kenner, 1965: 123). Both Eliot and Yeats, prompted by the Russian Revolution perhaps, or the violence and horror of the First World War, pictured a Europe that was failing, that was literally falling apart, devoid of the ontological sense of rational purpose that fuelled post-Enlightenment Europe and America. (Bradbury, 1991, Cantor, 1988, Shaffer, 1993)
In many ways, Modernism, as a literary movement saw, in itself, the notions of the decentred discourse that has formed so much a part of post-modernism ever since (Norris, 4 See also “The poem quotes Blake and both echoes and parodies the most thematically vital passage in Shelley's most ambitious poem, Prometheus Unbound, as a number of critics have remarked.” (Bloom, 1972:317)
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1982, Norris, 1992, Foucault, 1992). Poems like The Waste Land and The Second Coming trace, I think, the dissolution of the “grand narratives” (Lyotard, 1999) of society, that were instigated by the thinkers of the Enlightenment like Descartes and Locke and later Kant and Marx.
This philosophical Modernity has, in Bradbury’s Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 (1991) at least, been considered a distinct entity in itself, separate from its literary counterpart that is referred to under the sobriquet Modernism. However, and especially when considering Yeat’s poem it is instructive to view both Modernity and Modernism as being merely two parts of the same ideological movement. Beginning, perhaps, with Descartes’ cogito and ending with Lyotards’ The Post-modern Condition.
The Second Coming is Yeats’ realisation that the morals and intellectual base of the Enlightenment, its faith in rationality if you will, is being slowly eroded by the absurdity of mass death and the psychosocial rupture of the unconscious prompted by Freud and Adler.
“Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming!” (Yeats, 1978: 211)
Here Yeats uses the quasi-biblical language of Blake to suggest not the destruction of the world, but the failure of a world order , the image of the impassive sphinx is the
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concretisation of the pure temporal drive, (Bloom, 19 72) moving all the time nearer civilisation. The image is at once, terrifying and beautiful reflecting that other great Yeastian poem of social change Easter 1916 :
“He too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty s born.” (Yeats, 1978: 2 03)
Both paint portraits of a world in transition and a beauty that is, in the true Kantian sense, sublime, traversing existing notions of morality, ethics or even aesthetics, Walter E Houghton sums up Yeats’ vision concisely in his essay published in The Permanence of Yeats (Hall Martin: 1950):
“Overwhelmed by this nightmare vision, Yeats could only revolt with a "rage to end all things."” (Hall, 1950:386)
The image of the creeping apocalypse in the form of the sphinx that “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born” (Yeats, 1978:211) is, of course, not heralding the end of the world, or even the end of morality but the end of Modernism, the philo-literary movement centered on rationality and teleological achievement. Yeats, like Eliot and like Pound in The Cantos, senses this occurring, as gradually, what they as a movement and inheritors of an intellectual position fails and begins to lose faith in its own ability. These images, tropes and symbols litter Modernist texts but find their most literal and eloquent
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expression in The Waste Land and The Second Coming .
References
Bloom, Harold, Yeats, (Oxford, 1972) Bradbury, Malcolm and McFarlance, James, Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930, (Penguin, 1991) Cantor, Norman, Twentieth Century Culture: Modernism to Deconstruction, (Peter Lang, 1988) Eliot, T.S., Collected Poems and Plays, (Faber and Faber, 1989) Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things, (Routledge, 1992) Hall Martin, James, The Permanence of Yeats, (Macmillan, 1950) Hone, Joseph, W.B. Yeats, (Pelican, 1962) Joyce, James, Finnegan’s Wake, (Penguin, 1992) Kenner, Hugh, The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot , (Methuen, 1965) Lyotard, Jean Francois, The Post Modern Condition, published in The Post Modern History Reader (Routledge, 1998) Norris, Christopher, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, (Methuen, 1983) Norris, Christopher, Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory, (Leicester University Press, 1992) Pound, Ezra, The Cantos, (Faber and Faber, 1986) Sahffer, Brian, The Blinding Torch: Modern British Fiction and the Discourse of
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Civilization, (University of Massachusetts Press, 1993) Tratner, Michael, Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats, (Stanford University Press, 1995) Yeats, W.B., Collected Poems, (Papermac, 1978)
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