THE SECOND COMING:A POEM EVERY WRITER NEEDS TO KNOW

By Roy Peter Clark

From Poynter

November 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of one of the most famous and influential poems of the 20th century. It is titled “The Second Coming.” It was written in 1919 by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats.

To understand the enduring power of “The Second Coming,” it helps to know the historical and personal context in which it was written. For Yeats in 1919, it must have looked as if the world was falling apart.

World War I, the so-called Great War, was over, but not its terrible consequences of death, injury, madness and dislocation. The Russian Revolution shook the world order. An Irish rebellion for independence from the British was crushed. 

And the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 and 1919 had killed millions. Yeats wrote the poem while his pregnant wife was recovering from a near-death struggle with the disease.

In short, things were falling apart. Sound familiar?

Here is the poem in its entirety — 22 lines, republished for educational purposes:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center 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 blind 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 toward Bethlehem to be born?

To read rest of story, click on link: https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2020/happy-100th-anniversary-to-the-poem-that-every-writer-needs-to-know/