Poetry Review W B Yeats The Second Coming

Tweet

This deceptively complex mysterious poem from 1921 presents the very opposite to what its title promises. The ‘rough beast’ slouching towards Bethlehem for its rebirth is not Jesus. The poem offers depression and chaos rather than hope. Written three years after the horrors of the Great War, the poem seems to prophesise the inevitability of the next one. Could the beast be Marxist Communism, or the proto-Nazi right wing opposition movement that between them, tore Europe apart in the inter-war years. The opening image has a falcon losing sight of the falconer who has trained, fed and flown it. Society below its sky high view descends into anarchy, and everything polarizes to extreme left or right. There is no longer a political centre ground. Nature, meaning, faith and society are in chaos and tatters. A sphynx seems to come to life in the desert, a hybrid of man and monster in the wasteland, bringing darkness with it. There is a grim ambiguity and unsettling air to this poem, one of William Butler Yeats’s finest and best known. The poem on Youtube read by Dominic West Arthur Chappell