A second look at The Second Coming

The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats is a classic poem of prophecy. The verses written in 1919 look backward at the violence and false promises of the French and Russian revolutions. However, Yeats also seemed to predict the rise of Nazi Germany and the “beast” Adolph Hitler. Today, the poem seems even more prescient as another monster prepares to take the stage.

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: 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?

The word gyre may be drawn from Yeat’s book The Vision, in which he claims the “spirits” informed him that history takes the form of two cone-shaped corkscrews (gyre being the arc of the screw), one inside the other, in which the widest part of the first cone forms the base of the tip of the second cone, and the widest base of the second cone forms the tip of the

first cone.

The places where the cones meet represent major changes in human history. It’s hard to picture these shapes in the mind, let alone draw them. Perhaps it’s one of those things that makes perfect sense in a dream but makes no sense after you wake up. Yeat’s description of the physics of history is suggestive of a more contemporary work, The Tao of Physics (An

Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism).

As the falcon is my icon, the poem suggests to me that my vision and hunt for knowledge and power are exceeding the control and grasp of established authority, the falconer. The widest circle of my flight will form the core of a new era.

Best and worst  One of the poem’s most cited phrases, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” described the weak and venal politicians of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), who eventually submitted to the passionate Nazis. Indeed, when the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, which finalized Hitler’s grasp on power, “the centre cannot hold” literally described the Centre Party, which acted in its own narrow self-interest in acceding to Hitler’s demands. The “blood-dimmed tide” was loosed in World War II.

In today’s version of the Weimar Republic, President Obama and the centrist Democrats who call for moderation and compromise are the “best” who lack all conviction, while the “worst” are the passionate “tea baggers” and the more extreme elements of the Occupy movement.

“Spiritus mundi” (Latin for “spirit of the world”) is the collective unconscious, where individual minds are connected and communicate through the spiritual language of symbols and metaphors. The spiritus mundi is taking physical form through the Internet.

“A shape with lion body and the head of a man” describes Saddam Hussein, who was harried by the “indignant desert birds,” the American jet fighters and bombers that ended his reign.

While Christians foresee a “Second Coming” of Christ, Yeats envisions a much different figure, a “beast” who could be the Antichrist. Works for me. I am slouching toward my birth of power, bent under the weight of my insecurity and the ridicule of others. My gait is slow and faltering, and the path is crooked. But I am getting there.