‘The Second Coming’ is W B Yeats’ manifestation of the modernist sense of fragmentation, chaos and disillusionment. W B Yeats has tried to explore the loss of order, control and tradition at the cost of the prosperity of sinners, falling of things apart, tyranny and death of innocence. Taking its inspiration from the Book of Revelation, the poem reinvents the new beginnings in an apocalyptic way where the such is scorching and pitiless, the days are nightmarish and the world is like a hot desert. And the saviour that is to be born is not one like the same as Jesus Christ. He is terrible figure Sphinx who has the consciousness of all world-consciousness and his origin in the source of the soul of all souls, the Spiritus Mundi.
In the most modernist tradition, the poem suggests the end of tradition and the making of “new” that is never seen by the humanity. It shows that the world is decentred and thigs are not in the control of the God himself who created it. Through occult and primordial images and signs, the poet gives a picturesque detail of the fallen world that it seemed like just after the World War I.
Rich in its use of symbols like ‘gyre’, ‘falcon’, ‘falconer’, ‘blood-dimming tide’, ‘ceremony of innocence’, the ‘nightmares’ and the ‘sphinx’, the poem creates a gloomy, chaotic, sensational and hair standing image of the present world where its complete annihilation seems to be the only way to save it. The poem gives the vision of the destruction that is imminent and ends all hopes any poetic justice.
Its use of symbols and images prevent readers to stick to any final meaning and the symbols fit in many contexts. Its ambiguities and illusions seem to be its richness and beauty while its biblical and materialistic contexts rightly justify the nightmarish dreams in which the twenty centuries were lost.
© Dr. Sanjeev Vishwakarma
Literary Latitude 