An Analysis of Yeats The Second Coming Essay -- Yeats Second Coming E

An Analysis of Yeats The irregular ComingYeats poetry The Second Coming, written in 1919 and published in 1921 in his ingathering of poems Michael Robartes and the Dancer, taps into the archetype of the gyre and depicts the approach of a new manhood order. The gyre is one of Yeats favorite motifs, the vagary that history occurs in cycles, specifically cycles twenty centuries in length (Yeats, The Second Coming ln. 19). In this poem, Yeats predicts that the Christian era will soon give way apocalyptically to an era control by a godlike desert beast with the body of a lion and the head of a man (ln. 14). Critics have argued about the guide meaning of this image, but a close reading of the poem, combined with most simple genetic work, shows that Yeats saw the new order as a reign of terror haunted by war. The Second Coming, in its entirety, is an dumfounding encapsulation of Yeats idea of the gyre and his fears about the future of mankind it is expertly twine with threads of p rophetic literary reference and impressive poetic techniques.To begin, the gyre, a spiral or repeated circling motion, is a symbol and a concept that Yeats used repeatedly in his poetry and prose, and the poetics of The Second Coming ornament the idea of the gyre. The repeated words in the poem enforce the idea of spiral images (Drake 131) words and phrases, such as surely and is at slip by in lines 9 and 10, turning in line 1, is loosed in lines 4 and 5, and the very title, Second Coming in lines 10 and 11, are repeated, creating an onomatopoeic effect suggesting the repetitive movement of the gyre (Bornstein 203). Similarly, repetitious or mated images give the same effect, as Yeats seems to cycle through his falcon (The Second Coming... ...tins, 1966. Drake, Nicholas. The Poetry of W. B. Yeats. London Penguin, 1991. Ellmann, Richard. The Identity of Yeats. New York Oxford, 1954. ---. Yeats the Man and the Masks. New York Macmillan, 1948. Jeffares, A. Norman. A Commentary on t he Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Stanford Stanford U., 1968. ---. W. B. Yeats. New York Humanities, 1971. Purdy, Dwight H. Biblical Echo and Allusion in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats Poetics and the Art of God. Lewisburg Bucknell U., 1994. Stock, A. G. W. B. Yeats His Poetry and Thought. London Cambridge, 1961. Yeats, William Butler. Michael Robartes and the Dancer Manuscript Materials. Eds. doubting Thomas Parkinson and Anne Brannen. Ithaca Cornell, 1994. ---. The Second Coming. Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. M. H. Abrams, et al. 6th ed. Vol. 2. New York Norton, 1993. 1880-81.