The Second Coming / Leda And The Swan [William Butler Yeats]

I first read Yeats(pronounced yeyts) when I was in senior high. (I think Yeats looks like Einstein...err...)


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?


[commentary]

"Another poem of birth. Notice how very casual Yeats is in that second strophe, how self-consciously fantastic and speculative he is. He doesn't insist that the Apocalypse is at hand, only that some revelation is. In fact, this poem's power lies, I think, in its--not only its inability but its unwillingness to specify the content of that revelation. Yeasts suggests that we think of this historical moment as the Second Coming. But this is not the return of Jesus that Christianity prophesizes. Yeats sees the Second Coming as an image, as a myth, an idea, a metaphor, a certain stylistic arrangement of experience. It comes out of what he calls Spiritus Mundi, a semi-technical term; Yeats's name for something like the collective unconscious of all peoples, a kind of repertoire of archetypes from which the symbols that we use to understand the world derive. This is really, I think, a radical if not heretical idea for the national poet of a Christian people. Yeats is saying that Christianity is only one symbolic order among others. It has a history. It is now passing away as it once came into being. He is also saying that the birth of Christ in Bethlehem was a nightmare for the world it altered, the world that it changed utterly – a change that Yeats sees as the end now of the Christian Era and not its fulfillment. There is in there, too, the disturbing suggestion that Christ himself was a rough beast." -- Langdon Hammer


Leda And The Swan

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?


[commentary]

"History, what makes history happen, is imaged here in the form of the rape of the human by the divine in the form of a beast, the form of a swan. The myth that Yeats takes up is of Zeus's rape of the maiden, Leda, whom he attacks as a swan. The offspring that the rape engenders includes Helen, the "terrible beauty" for whom the Trojan War was fought; also Clytemnestra, the wife of the Greek lord Agamemnon whom Clytemnestra murders on his return from Troy. Those future events are glimpsed in the sestet of this poem, in the final six lines. They are, in a sense, compressed and imaged and contained in the rape itself. There's a kind of radical foreshortening of temporal experience at what Yeats images as the orgasmic union of the divine and human – "a shudder in the loins" – bringing about the sack of Troy, the murder of the king, all that future contained in this generative, ambiguous violence in the present that the poem describes. In effect, in that middle part of the poem, Yeats collapses creation and destruction, suggesting that the same bestial energy flows through both of these acts. Here, divine force reduces to brute power in somewhat the same way as it does in "The Magi" and "The Second Coming...

One result of this is Yeats's – and this is interesting – his lack of interest in the god. This isn't a poem about Zeus; it's not a poem about the swan. He doesn't name the swan, just as he doesn't name the "rough beast" in "The Second Coming." What the swan thinks or feels or intends doesn't matter. The swan is really only a force, and Yeats's concern is rather with the human experience of that force, which is, again, another manifestation of "terrible beauty." Yeats explores that experience, which is an experience of suffering here and of violation, through a series of rhetorical questions, which are a crucial poetic device for Yeats. Yeats is a poet who asks questions. Questions, well, they're different, even rhetorical questions are different, aren't they, from statements of fact. They're more like propositions, like speculations, that we're asked to test through empathic identification with, in this case, the poem's subject, Leda. This is what the form of the question invites, I think." -- Langdon Hammer