"The Second Coming" -- an Analysis

The Second Coming
 by W. B. Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyreThings fall apart; the centre cannot holdMere anarchy is loosed upon the worldThe blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drownedThe 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 sightA 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 againThat 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?

           This is the payoff of “The Second Coming.” This sphinx-like creature is not the problem, not what the poet fears. It is, remember, nothing more than “a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi,” a bogeyman, a nightmare image, the demon that lives in the closet or under our beds as children, our imaginations playing tricks on us. “Twenty centuries of stony sleep,” two thousand years of Christianity, of a placebo that calms us, distracts us from our imperfect natures, and allows us to sleep peacefully – these twenty centuries of stony sleep are disturbed by “a rocking cradle.” It is whoever inhabits – or will soon inhabit – this rocking cradle that we should fear. Whoever it is whose cradle is being prepared has disturbed our complacency, awakened our fears, and driven this primitive, atavistic sphinx-monster – predatory animal driven by compassionless, calculating intellect – into our nightmares. “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” We don’t know. And that makes its imminent arrival even more frightening. So, what does it all mean? Is it a “religious” poem? I don’t think so, no. Yeats was not religious in that sense, despite his ancestry. He dabbled in Theosophy, attended séances, and befriended spiritualists, but he was not “religious” in the common sense of the term. It is clearly a fearful and anxious poem, perhaps a cynical poem, certainly far from a hopeful poem. Yeats seems to have lost hope in humanity. As a younger man before World War I, Yeats had been something of an idealist and was a central, driving force in the so-called “Gaelic Revival” in Ireland. Yeats saw Gaelic-Irish culture as being less refined and, therefore, more “pure” and “authentic” than English culture, and his poetry and plays highlight the nobility and heroism of the ancient mythic figures of Cuchullain, Finn MacCumhall, Oisin, and Mebd. Bourgeois English and Anglo-Irish culture lacked conviction (beyond commerce and profit); ancient Irish folk culture had a passionate intensity to it. And Yeats championed that culture and brought it to the people with the same sort of passionate intensity. Yeats’s work – along with the work in general of the Gaelic Revival – was also a source of passionately intense inspiration for the Irish revolutionary movement. He later worried (in his 1938 poem “The Man and the Echo”) “Did that play of mine (“Cathleen Ni Houlihan”) send out certain men the English shot?” By 1919, too, Yeats had suffered the loss of a romantic dream. As a young man he pursued the affections of Maud Gonne, another leading Anglo-Irish figure of the Gaelic Revival. He was rebuffed by her on many occasions (although they remained friends and many – myself included – believe he never surrendered his love for her) because he lacked sufficient revolutionary fervor and finally married George Hyde Lees in 1917. There was a lot of youthful idealism in Yeats’s life that he saw crushed by the spiritus mundi. As banal as this sounds, I believe Yeats was (as we say colloquially today) “in a bad place” when he wrote “The Second Coming.” He was an aristocrat who, as a youth, turned his back on (English) aristocratic manners and aligned himself with the common folk. Yet he hated Marxism and could never muster a lot of sympathy for the plight of the proletariat. He was a romantic who had his heart broken and settled, in his marriage, for second best. He was an idealist who eventually saw all his ideals destroyed by the ugly realities of the 20th century. And he had only just witnessed millions of lives being destroyed in a war like no one had ever seen before. As popular as “The Second Coming” has become since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I don’t think Yeats was trying to write a political poem, either. It is nothing more than the mark of good art that people found so many parallels between Yeats’s poem and the Iraq war. If there’s any real identifiable target of criticism in Yeats’s “The Second Coming” I would say it is the moral bankruptcy of commercialized mass culture and the banality of commoditized information. He makes no direct references to either culture or media, to be sure, but even a cursory knowledge of 20th century history would suggest Yeats would not be blind to the effects of media on culture. The radiotelegraph brought news of the sinking of the Titanic to the world in 1912. Broadcasts of music and speech were common by 1919. Propaganda had driven all sides of the conflict in World War I. “Mass production demands the education of the masses,” said Edward A. Filene, scion of the Boston department store empire, in 1919. “The masses must learn to behave like human beings in a mass production world.”  Walter Lippmann published “Public Opinion” in only 1922 (“When all think alike, then no one is really thinking…”) and Edward Bernays “Propaganda” in 1927 (“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country…”).  This is my and only my opinion, but I believe that William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is an expression of his despair over the decline of transcendent values in the new century, the decline of a compassionate humanism founded on and supported by those values, and the loss of his own idealism.