When Seeing Isn't Healing: Yeats At His Peak

Yeats week concludes with the poem I not only memorized in 1998 before I went to Ireland for the first time but it is the poem I can never get out of my head. It’s beautifully written yet is so visual it has taken on many meanings for me throughout the years. Yeats wrote The Second Coming after WWI and in a period of his own life where he was re-examining his own spirituality. Much has been written about this particular poem but what I love about re-reading it from the text I had as an undergrad is that the notes I wrote in the margin are lucid and terse but I remember why I wrote each and every one of them.

This poem, historically, begins a period of Yeats’ writing in which he goes on to speak more about the “gyre” and his spirituality (which may be strange to some people) which will continue to be a favorite theme of his critics and biographers.  I tend to see this poem differently. I like to think Yeats saw WWI and what was happening in Ireland and perhaps around the world and felt that civilization itself was reverting to a more barbaric time, an unhappy phase of history that he couldn’t stomach as a writer, an artist and human. And I think this realization made the man a little numb from disappointment.

Maybe we all go through something like this during our lives where we think we can help change the world or at least we believe we can be part of improving things for the better. Yeats wrote The Second Coming when he was 54 years old (in 1919) old and I truly believe this signifies a turning point in his writing. By invoking images of the Sphinx, a lowering of light and a circling of what can only be considered to be vultures, or at least the nasty black birds that are everywhere in Dublin, this poem doesn’t signify much hope for the world.

I can’t say I blame him; Yeats lived in and through truly terrible times. But this is the poem, for me, where Yeats has reached his peak in terms of creating his own great stuff. Sure, he will go on to write political poems, spiritual poems, eulogize Parnell and others, but they aren’t his own poetry and I think he recognized his sad function as a writer before the world did. 

To me, this is his masterpiece. Thank you, William Butler Yeats, for being a poet, dramatist and writer of many colours, styles and themes and for being the timeless, ever-relevant author of things I'll always read. 

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The 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 sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A 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 again; but now I know
That 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?