Symbols for Yeats Were Conduits to a World of Platonic Forms

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Symbolism: “Hearts with one purpose alone” are described as “enchanted to a stone to trouble the living stream”

Type of Reading, Author.

Explanation

Values implied in this type of reading.

Type of Reading, Author.

Explanation

Values implied in this type of reading.

The Second Coming

Analysis

Main Ideas: Describes anarchy and chaos of the modern age, and surmises that the second coming of a new messiah is about to come about.

Preoccupations: Time and change, Pessimism, The gyres and the great wheel.

Poetic Techniques: Almost non existent. Contributes to the nihilistic tone and sense of chaos suggested in the first two lines.

Point of View: First person. There is no intermediary persona. Yeats takes on the role of a visionary/prophet, one who is “Sure that some revelation is at hand.”

Tone: Gloom/Foreboding “vast image out of spiritus mundi troubles my sight.”

Language: Ominous, Negative: “nightmare,” “darkness,” “reel.”

Imagery: “blood dimmed tide,” “rough beast.”

Philosophical system: Gyres. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre.” 2000 year cycles of history.

Romantic, Bloom.

Explanation: “Direct relation to Blake and Shelley as an overtly defining element in its meaning.” The title is “a misleading and illegitimate device for conferring upon the poem a range of reference and imaginative power it does not possess and cannot sustain.” Associating the poem with Christ’s prophecy of his second coming and with revelations account of the antichrist, is a “portentuous association.” “Remains a poem about the second birth of the antithetical divinity or spirit.”

Sphinx imagery was inspired by Shelley’s ozymandias. Also likens his beast to Urizen from the “the book of Urizen” by Blake.

Christianity is “largely irrelevant to the poem… dragged into its vortex by Yeats’ title.

“The poet says “surely” revelation, the uncovering of apocalypse, is at hand, but what in the poem justifies this surely?”

“There is imagistic desperation in Yeats’ closing rhetorical lunge.”

Values implied in this type of reading: Defence of 19th century romantic critics. Belief in a reality beyond the human senses.

Christian, Jeffarres.

Explanation: “The Falcon represents man, present civilization, becoming out of touch with Christ, whose birth as the revelation which marked the beginning of the two thousand years of Christianity.” “The new era looked likely to be one of irrational force…”

Values: Christian Values

New Historicist, John Harrison

Explanation:

Values: Nietzschean.

The poem reflects, prophesies and lambastes the nature of humanity in the modern era, and the shit from Christianity to a new breed (‘second coming’) of the pagan, with the repudiation of all authority. Written in a period of international and internal conflict/uprisings (WW1, Bolsheviks, Easter Irish), the poem is in itself an indictment of the modern age.

- STANZA ONE: “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”; Yeats diminishes the horror of anarchy by calling it ‘mere’, because worse is to come – ‘mere’ sneers at it in both sense and sound. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed…is drowned”; Yeats believes the results of anarchy are catastrophic; everything is and will be destroyed. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”; Yeats doesn’t acquit the rules and aristocrats from responsibility – by best, he also means artists, thinkers, academics.

- STANZA TWO: “Surely some revelation is at hand”; Yeats reflects the Christian teaching that breaking of nations would herald the end of the world, the apocalypse – but the second coming envisaged is distinctly pagan, not Christian. “Somewhere in the sands…indignant desert birds.” the vision is of a troubling world spirit whose purpose is to bring a new age – the image is of an Egyptian sphinx, traditional pagan symbol. “The darkness drops again…slouches toward Bethlehem; horrifying yet brief: the new pagan-anarchic world is the result of 2000 years of Christian suppression of the pagan, confirming his view of the waning and waxing of the natural and supernatural in individuals and civilizations.

- CRITICAL READING by GEOFFREY THURLEY (1983, ‘The Turbulent Dream’): The increasing anarchy of 20th century life is most forcibly expressed in The Second Coming – Yeats draws upon metaphors of control to underline the futility of man’s attempts to exercise mastery over his own twin creations – society and himself.

- “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Remains true of current day, the best, being civilized, have learned that their own desires must be sublimated, while the world are so by a natural process of ‘selection’.

- Yeats’s opposition of best and worst should be understood within a context in which a confrontation of enlightened order and ignorant barbarism was being engineered by socio-political evolution.

Sailing to Byzantium

Analysis

Main ideas: Dichotomy established between Yeats’ aging body and his still useful intellect.

Preoccupations: Aging, The Gyre and the great wheel, Afterlife.

Tone: Wistful. Yeats who is estranged and alienated from “sensual music” longs to be gathered into the “artifice of eternity.”

Symbolism: Byzantium is a “holy city” a world of artistic magnificence and permanence, where once at