William Butler Yeats
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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?
3 comments:
This poem reflects Europe after the Great War ( WarI).The main theme is to compare between how Europe was before the war and how it becomes after the war
Yeats describes how far people are from the greatness of Europe before the war and how being far from God affects on their life during that period.
In the first stanza,Yeats compares between people's life before the war and after it. He concentrates on the weak faith of them here that they are in need to religion to guide their life.He uses the word " falcon " to refer to people who are supposed to be the followers of God and religion and he uses the word " falconer" to refer to God or the divine which guide them to the right way. Then he talking about how they are apart from the beginning greatness of them and how the give up hope even the good people like thinkers, philosophers and poets can't convince them about things they want to do or they do nothing to convince them.
In the second stanza, Yeats starts talking about " the new coming"which is of course unrealistic thing. life is completely changed but to the worst and he says that Europe destroys itself when it takes part in the war. People there become weak in body as well as in mind that they start thinking only about bad things .
In the last stanza, he blames the great people living in that period about not expecting the effects that might affects on their life after the war and he mentions the old story about the baby monster who was not cared by anyone then he went to where he can find legitimacy.
I agree with Walaa and I want to add that this poem is based on Yeat's special theory of history. According to his theory, cycles of history and nature occur every two thousand years. During this time one civilization grows, improves, decays, and dissolves, and then a new civilization takes its place. The title of the poem refers to the New Testament prediction of the return of Jesus Christ to the earth at the end of the world.
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