"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations
"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy
I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike
"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti
[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]
The Tyger
Tyger, Tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand did seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? What the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?
Tyger, Tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
William Blake, 1757-1827
The Lamb
Little lamb, who made thee?
Does thou know who made thee,
Gave thee life, and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice?
Little lamb, who made thee?
Does thou know who made thee?
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee;
Little lamb, I’ll tell thee:
He is callèd by thy name,
For He calls Himself a Lamb.
He is meek, and He is mild,
He became a little child.
I a child, and thou a lamb,
We are callèd by His name.
Little lamb, God bless thee!
Little lamb, God bless thee!
Blake's frontispiece for Songs of Innocence and of Experience
Songs of Innocence and of Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. It appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.
"Innocence" and "Experience" are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's existential-mythic states of "Paradise" and the "Fall." Blake's categories are modes of perception that tend to coordinate with a chronology that would become standard in Romanticism: childhood is a time and a state of protected "innocence," but not immune to the fallen world and its institutions. This world sometimes impinges on childhood itself, and in any event becomes known through "experience," a state of being marked by the loss of childhood vitality, by fear and inhibition, by social and political corruption, and by the manifold oppression of Church, State, and the ruling classes.
The volume's "Contrary States" are sometimes signaled by patently repeated or contrasted titles: in Innocence, Infant Joy, in Experience, Infant Sorrow; in Innocence, The Lamb, in Experience, The Fly and The Tyger.
Songs of Innocence was originally a complete work first printed in 1789. It is a conceptual collection of 19 poems, engraved with artwork.
Blake's title plate (No.29) for Songs of Experience
Songs of Experience is a 1794 poetry collection of 26 poems forming the second part of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Some of the poems, such as The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found were moved by Blake to Songs of Innocence, and were frequently moved between the two books.
In this collection of poems, Blake contrasts Songs of Innocence, in which he shows how the human spirit blossoms when allowed its own free movement with Songs of Experience, in which he shows how the human spirit withers after it has been suppressed and forced to conform to rules, and doctrines. In fact, Blake was an English Dissenter and actively opposed the doctrines of the Anglican Church, which tells its members to suppress their feelings. Blake showed how he believed this was wrong through his poems in Songs of Experience.
The most notable of the poems in Songs of Experience are: "The Tyger", "The Sick Rose", "Ah, Sunflower," "A Poison Tree" and "London". Although these poems today are enjoyed and appreciated, in Blake's time, they were not appreciated at all.
Blake lived this whole life in poverty and in heavy debt. Songs of Experience only sold 20 copies before his death in 1827. It is now used in the school GCSE and A-level curriculum.
Poet Allen Ginsberg believed the poems were originally intended to be sung, and that through study of the rhyme and meter of the works, a Blakean performance could be approximately replicated. In 1969, he conceived, arranged, directed, sang on, and played piano and harmonium for an album of songs entitled Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, tuned by Allen Ginsberg (1970).[2]
The composer William Bolcom completed a setting of the entire collection of poems in 1984. In 2005, a recording of Bolcom's work by Leonard Slatkin, the Michigan State Childrens Choir, and the University of Michigan on the Naxos label won 3 Grammy Awards: Best Choral Performance, Best Classical Contemporary Composition, and Best Classical Album.[3]
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 the 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?
The Second Coming was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the first World War. The above version of the poem is as it was published in the edition of Michael Robartes and the Dancer dated 1920 (there are numerous other versions of the poem). The preface and notes in the book contain some philosophy attributed to Robartes.
This printing of the poem has a page break between lines 17 and 18 making the stanza division unclear. Following the two most similar drafts given in the Parkinson and Brannen edited edition of the manuscripts, I have put a stanza break there. (Interestingly, both of those drafts have thirty centuries instead of twenty.) The earlier drafts also have references to the French and Irish Revolutions as well as to Germany and Russia.
Several of the lines in the version above differ from those found in subsequent versions. In listing it as one of the hundred most anthologized poems in the English language, the text given by Harmon (1998) has changes including: line 13 (": somewhere in sands of the desert"), line 17 ("Reel" instead of "Wind"), and no break between the second and third stanza.
Yeats, William Butler. Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Chruchtown, Dundrum, Ireland: The Chuala Press, 1920. (as found in the photo-lithography edition printed Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970)
Yeats, William Butler. "Michael Robartes and the Dancer" Manuscript Materials. Thomas Parkinson and Anne Brannen, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Harmon, William, ed. The Classic Hundred Poems. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening “gyre” (spiral), cannot hear the falconer; “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”; anarchy is loosed upon the world; “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The best people, the speaker says, lack all conviction, but the worst “are full of passionate intensity.”
Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” No sooner does he think of “the Second Coming,” then he is troubled by “a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx (“A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun”) is moving, while the shadows of desert birds reel about it. The darkness drops again over the speaker’s sight, but he knows that the sphinx’s twenty centuries of “stony sleep” have been made a nightmare by the motions of “a rocking cradle.” And what “rough beast,” he wonders, “its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Form
“The Second Coming” is written in a very rough iambic pentameter, but the meter is so loose, and the exceptions so frequent, that it actually seems closer to free verse with frequent heavy stresses. The rhymes are likewise haphazard; apart from the two couplets with which the poem opens, there are only coincidental rhymes in the poem, such as “man” and “sun.”
Commentary
Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, “The Second Coming” is one of Yeats’s most famous and most anthologized poems; it is also one of the most thematically obscure and difficult to understand. (It is safe to say that very few people who love this poem could paraphrase its meaning to satisfaction.) Structurally, the poem is quite simple—the first stanza describes the conditions present in the world (things falling apart, anarchy, etc.), and the second surmises from those conditions that a monstrous Second Coming is about to take place, not of the Jesus we first knew, but of a new messiah, a “rough beast,” the slouching sphinx rousing itself in the desert and lumbering toward Bethlehem. This brief exposition, though intriguingly blasphemous, is not terribly complicated; but the question of what it should signify to a reader is another story entirely.
Yeats spent years crafting an elaborate, mystical theory of the universe that he described in his book A Vision. This theory issued in part from Yeats’s lifelong fascination with the occult and mystical, and in part from the sense of responsibility Yeats felt to order his experience within a structured belief system. The system is extremely complicated and not of any lasting importance—except for the effect that it had on his poetry, which is of extraordinary lasting importance. The theory of history Yeats articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram made of two conical spirals, one inside the other, so that the widest part of one of the spirals rings around the narrowest part of the other spiral, and vice versa. Yeats believed that this image (he called the spirals “gyres”) captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process, and he divided each gyre into specific regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual’s development).
“The Second Coming” was intended by Yeats to describe the current historical moment (the poem appeared in 1921) in terms of these gyres. Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre. In his definitive edition of Yeats’s poems, Richard J. Finneran quotes Yeats’s own notes:
The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to its place of greatest contraction... The revelation [that] approaches will... take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre...
In other words, the world’s trajectory along the gyre of science, democracy, and heterogeneity is now coming apart, like the frantically widening flight-path of the falcon that has lost contact with the falconer; the next age will take its character not from the gyre of science, democracy, and speed, but from the contrary inner gyre—which, presumably, opposes mysticism, primal power, and slowness to the science and democracy of the outer gyre. The “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem is the symbol of this new age; the speaker’s vision of the rising sphinx is his vision of the character of the new world.
This seems quite silly as philosophy or prophecy (particularly in light of the fact that it has not come true as yet). But as poetry, and understood more broadly than as a simple reiteration of the mystic theory of A Vision, “The Second Coming” is a magnificent statement about the contrary forces at work in history, and about the conflict between the modern world and the ancient world. The poem may not have the thematic relevance of Yeats’s best work, and may not be a poem with which many people can personally identify; but the aesthetic experience of its passionate language is powerful enough to ensure its value and its importance in Yeats’s work as a whole.
‘The Second Coming’ is WB Yeats’s most quoted poem – and almost certainly the most widely quoted poem of the last hundred years. Its prediction of the savage birth of the modern era recently celebrated its one hundredth birthday following the poem’s first publication in 1920. Ever since, its slouching rough beast has cast a shadow across the century.
Even now literary scholarship struggles to deal with such a phenomenon. In the midst of a pandemic, attention has focussed more on when Yeats wrote the poem, January 1919, amid the first stirrings of the Irish War of Independence and (as outlined in Elizabeth Outka’s Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature (2019)) the raging Spanish flu epidemic, his wife dangerously sick and eight months pregnant with a child the spirits had promised would be a (male) avatar of a new age. When unexpectedly a daughter arrived, the spirits (indignantly questioned in sessions of automatic writing piloted by Yeats’s wife George) hastily avowed her to be the reincarnation of a distant ancestor named Anne Yeats. Named Anne after that ancestor, the child was no avatar, but became one of Ireland’s most underrated artists. Historically speaking, predicting a Second Coming is a risky business: somehow you nearly always get it wrong, at least in terms of timing. Sadly, as advent prophecies go, the spirits’ avatar promise has proved less accurate than the poem’s grim forecast of a century’s violent birth.
A less-regarded tendency of modern scholarship highlights the poem’s actual advent, its birthday publication November 1920 in The Dial, an American literary monthly requisitioned earlier that year by James Sibley Watson and Scofield Thayer as a forum for radical new poetry. Printing friends like e.e. cummings, Carl Sandburg, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound, the magazine would see the first American appearance of TS Eliot’s apocalyptic The Waste Land, and the poet Marianne Moore in the editor’s chair. (These high points were short-lived: by the decade’s end the magazine was shuttered and Thayer institutionalized, afflicted by the kind of paranoid schizophrenia Yeats’s poem seems to anticipate, his astonishing art collection left to the Met.) By publishing there Yeats was keeping company with the vanguard of American modernism, affirming him no longer a minor Victorian lyric poet or unsuccessful Irish playwright, but undeniably a contemporary voice. Though no others from the group of poems he offered to The Dial made a similar leap into super stardom, poems like ‘Towards Break of Day’, ‘Michael Robartes and the Dancer’ and ‘Demon and Beast’ reveal similar dream-like preoccupations with elemental creatures: dragons, stags, and sphinxes.
Political readings are tempting, too, especially given Yeats’s later drift into authoritarian politics. Certainly the poem cuts athwart a Whiggish view of history as progress, yet with all references to the Russian Revolution and the Irish Troubles purged from the drafts, its vision, however troubling, is impossible to align with any particular creed, from Marxism or fascism to ecocriticism: the climbing hooks of critics slide off. ‘The Second Coming’ works because of what it leaves out, going beyond the particular circumstances of its composition, political context, and publication. It is the poem above all that makes axiomatic the idea that literature can outdistance its origins, that readers are the ones who create meaning: as WH Auden put it in his ‘In Memory of WB Yeats’, ‘The words of a dead man | Are modified in the guts of the living’. ‘The Second Coming’, as used and re-used over and over again in the intervening hundred years, is a poem so modified in the guts of the living it tells the history of the century. Resonant phrases are borrowed as book titles (Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion, Mere Anarchy by Woody Allen), added to songs by Lou Reed and Joni Mitchell, and quoted by figures as diverse as Slavoj Žižek and George W. Bush. In fact the poem is invoked by a succession of American presidents (or their speechwriters) from John F Kennedy to the incoming Joe Biden. (Finding 22 lines of taut verse outside his tweet-addled experience, the White House’s outgoing occupant has instead the distinction that from 2016 his ubiquity has helped cause an exponential rise in the poem’s world-wide use).
‘The Second Coming’ in popular culture: image courtesy of Neil Mann
This is a poem which through the endless crises of world wars and late capitalism, through potential nuclear or environmental cataclysm, keeps on telling the story of the century. Rather than laboriously note each use, it makes sense to ask why it so often rhymes with the times. ‘Literature is news that stays news’ said Ezra Pound: that’s its job. The question is, why has this piece stayed news? Partly it is our fault. As Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse (2020) acutely observes:
We are alive at a time of worst case scenarios […]. Look: there are fascists in the streets, and in the palaces. Look: the weather has gone uncanny, volatile, malevolent.
Such is the modern condition; every succeeding age is or considers itself uniquely damned. Even then, plenty of powerful expressions of twentieth-century angst have not had such purchase. Paul Valéry’s ‘La Crise de l’Esprit’ (‘Crisis of the Mind’, 1919), like ‘The Second Coming’, laments that ‘the illusion of a European culture has been lost, and knowledge has been proved impotent to save anything whatsoever’ – just right, for instance, to introduce a journal issue Christine Reynier and I co-edited on non-fiction narratives of war and peace. What about ‘The Second Coming’ makes it different?
The obvious answer is that it is a poem. Poems do things differently. As O’Connell also says, ‘Listen. Attune your ear to the general discord’. And this, it seems to me, is what Yeats’s poem makes us do. It forces us, whether we know it or not, to listen to discordant times. To understand how, it might be better not to treat the poem as a compilation of quotable extracts, but instead try again to attune to what is poetic about it, what makes it stick in our collective inner ear.
This is a tricky task – even for such a short poem. This brief attempt focuses on just four talismanic words, pivots about which the poem turns: gyre, mere, surely, hour. There are a hundred and more patterns to be picked out, but attending to these words and their resonances might help map the poem’s contours.
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?
Amid the opening’s obsessive mounting repeats, turning and turning, falcon and falconer, this strange word gyre sticks out: for most of us to recall its correct pronunciation (hard g, to rhyme with wire), never mind its meaning, is a struggle. To thrust into the very first line this old, rare word for a spiral, circular turn, or vortex, opens a disorienting world, where all that is familiar becomes unfamiliar.
Interlocking gyres from WB Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1921)
The poem’s first readers could not have known the elaborate philosophical system behind Yeats’s choice of word. Essentially it involved two kinds of movements, of polar opposites and cycles, producing a dynamic of two interpenetrating cones or gyres, tracking movements of historical recurrence and change – and a whole lot of confusing drawings. They did though have a chance of half-recalling, as few do now, how the history of the term implies violence.
Some maybe remembered its use in steepling cumulation (‘wave on wave and gyre on gyre’) by Yeats’s mentor WE Henley, from a collection belligerently titled Song of the Sword. Yeats himself may have first encountered the word when it sings a similar song of a sword in Edmund Spenser’s Fairie Queene, a poem with which he grew up, and edited for publication thirteen years before the appearance of ‘The Second Coming’. In Spenser’s Book II Canto V, a lesson in moderation and ‘temperaunce’ is dished out to an errant knight called Pyrrochles. Guyon bests him in battle because he can’t control his temper, or his sword: he ‘is full of such ire’ he cannot wield it with
his approued skill, to ward, Or strike, or hurtle rownd in warlike gyre
In other words Pyrrochles is unable to manoeuvre his sword in the tight violent circles (each a gyre) of his training. Instead he ‘rudely rag’d like a cruel tiger’, less man than animal It is hard not to see echoes in ‘The Second Coming’, in which rational man gives way to raging beast: especially as in Spenser gyre suggests a strange combination of violence and control – just right, in other words, for a poem of the same bloodline. Because although ‘Things fall apart’, and like the unreckonable falcon go out of control, this is a poem of controlled violence.
Spiralling gyre from WB Yeats, A Vision (1937)
The controlled violence of ‘The Second Coming’ can be heard when turning from gyre, an arcane word, to a more familiar word used arcanely: mere. Mere does not in its modern offhand usage belittle the anarchy it modifies: it is employed here in its older alchemical sense to mean something pure, unadulterated. Mereanarchy is thus fused together like those yoked opposites that punctuate Yeats’s poems of this period (every Irish schoolchild knows ‘Easter 1916’ and its ‘terrible beauty’; Allen Ginsberg prizes ‘the murderous innocence of the sea’ from ‘A Prayer for My Daughter’, written just after ‘The Second Coming’). If anarchy should denote complete disorder (to Yeats, who had studied alchemy’s purifications) mere anarchy suggests something distilled, focussed, even directed. As the poem seems to know, maybe mere anarchy is the product of some ordering principle, which makes it that much more malevolent.
The poem reveals, in other words, an order, a twisted logic behind the apparent disorder of the contemporary world – and of its own working. The poem divulges this without troubling to assemble the familiar pattern of words in rhyming pairs at the end of each line. The opening hints at off-rhymes and half-rhymes (for instance hold and world) have, unusually for Yeats, by the end entirely disintegrated. For a poem like this, maybe, end-rhymes are too neat, too pat for the depiction of such an apocalyptic scene.
Yet there are patterns to be found. Words beginning lines have important roles too. So gyre and mere are matched closer in sound than nearer end-rhyme candidates like falconer. Joining these with hear, everywhere and Are discloses a connecting thread just about holding together the disconnected aphoristic clauses of the poem’s opening. All these words turn (however merely or slightly) towards an r sound. As a consequence, minds gyre and mere contain comparable diphthongs (mere in some pronunciations or accents), altering the shape of each vowel as it is uttered. Together they inaugurate a sequence gyre, mere, surely, hour, where the overtones of each vowel follow an arc upwards and then turn successively lower and darker in grim succession. Something of the poem’s meaning is being enacted in sound (as can be heard in Ted Hughes’s powerful reading of the poem).
Surely marks the moment the reasonable first part – featuring the bitter observations which everyone always quotes – gives way to a second part of quite different tone: Helen Vendler calls it ‘oracular’. Surely does keep up the sonic sequence, forming a similar noise before its second syllable changes direction, but it sounds now like a voice is addressing us, enjoining the reader to share in the speaker’s prophetic vision. When for good measure surely repeats on the next line it sounds a note of desperate anticipation, begging us to recognise the inevitable return. Surely’s doubling is followed by the double cry of ‘the Second Coming’, the poem pausing to notice its irresistible vocalization (‘Hardly are those words out’) before stammering out its vision. Such a pattern of recurrence and difference seems to explain that things don’t just fall apart, they happen again, if in a different, more vocal and more violent way.
These bodily cries come from within. Vendler notices its fourteen lines could make up a sonnet, that traditional vehicle of emotion – but a defective or inverted one, its eight-line opening still crudely attached. If the first part’s rationally worded despair represented the head, the second part embodies the belly, the body of the poem. Which makes sense, as it introduces a terrifying deformed creature, ‘A shape with lion body and the head of a man’, weirdly matched with the poem’s semi-detached parts.
Spenser, a colonial administrator in Ireland, had few rivals (until Yeats) in his descriptions of violence. Notably, what had made The Fairie Queene’s Pyrrochles so angry was the brutal decapitation of his horse, leaving but a ‘truncked beast fast bleeding’. This is an image that seems almost to have leaked into Yeats’s poem, whose hybrid rough beast is always glimpsed in truncated body parts, with ‘blank gaze’ and ‘slow thighs’. Edmund Burke long ago explained how an object is the more terrifying when its limits remain unperceived – here, the animal’s ‘vast’ dimensions, form, and species all remain terrifyingly vague. Its name and origins are shrouded too: the word sphynx is never mentioned, so whether it emerges from the desert sands of Egyptian, or Greek, or Hebrew Old Testament myth to ask us riddling questions or loudly proclaim an apocalypse (Yeats associated it with ‘laughing ecstatic destruction’) is left to our imagination.
Yves Tanguy, Through Birds, Through Fire But Not Through Glass (1943) ?
The companion birthday poem ‘Demon and Beast’ only helps so much, containing as it does noisy creatures of a more quotidian order (‘that crafty demon and that loud beast / That plague me day and night’), but the poem does close by expressing the excitement, the ‘sweetness’ of religious revelation. This is something ‘The Second Coming’ shares. Only here the beast is the revelation: a dream called up to bodily reality through religious fervour, about which we reel irrationally, irresistibly, like the desert birds. As Hannah Arendt argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism:
To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of ‘historical necessity’, but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless and unreal.
Unreal but bloody, vivid yet unborn, perhaps the beast’s greatest terror is this: that it represents not simply an exterior malevolent force but a longed-for interior revelation born out of quiet desperation. This is a creature spawned by our collective imagination, the spiritus mundi of the poem, a nightmare distorted embodiment of our daytime thoughts, the word made flesh, and given, by us, a horrifyingly rapturous welcome.
This then is our rough beast: we created it. It is also hour rough beast. ‘What rough beast, its hour come round at last […]?’ is given the form of a sphynx’s unanswerable question: how, after all, can we know the future? Yet some answers are evident (‘now I know’ says the speaker). Precisely what this rough beast will be is unclear, but we too must know whose it is and (roughly) when it is: the long-gestated outcome of two millennia worth of hours, that terrible inexorable slow motion of twenty centuries now arriving on slow thighs, ‘at hand’, imminent, on time, ‘at last’ – presented in the poem’s paradoxically ever-present present in continual unhurried arriving, ‘slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born’, not for Christmas but a new advent. This is the way civilizations collapse: slowly – and then all at once.
The timing of all this was on Yeats’s mind. A long note featuring drawings of interlocking gyres (borrowed for the logo of Modernist Studies Ireland) from the poem’s first book publication at his sisters’ Cuala Press, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), concludes:
All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, heterogeneous civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash, though in a flash that will not strike only in one place, and will for a time be constantly repeated, of the civilization that must slowly take its place. This is too simple a statement, for much detail is possible.
By this account, rational accumulation of knowledge is superseded by successive lightning flashes ‘constantly repeated’: a continuing sequence of sudden millennial revelations. At just this time Yeats was pestering the spirits about a comparable kind of quasi-simultaneous revelation – exactly when and how a poem’s images could transfer to other minds – when a poem was written, when first read (what if it was never read?), or every time it was read by every reader (what if they didn’t understand it?). He never got a direct answer. Still, as even that most cerebral of poets TS Eliot allowed, ‘poetry communicates before it is understood’. Each time a poem is read carefully (especially, Yeats concluded, when read out loud) it is made present and might produce revelation.
To do this a poem must work in sound. As an advent poem actually, ‘The Second Coming’ remains forever anticipatory, in the time just before, the beast paradoxically ever-imminent, its dim revelations ‘constantly repeated’. For Yeats this said something about the nature of historical time, but also about the nature of poetry. Every time the poem is read, its second coming can complete a historical cycle, hour thus completing a pattern, and completing several coinciding cadences: hour picks up drowned, round, slouches, and forms part of the ever-darker turn reel, nightmare, hour, towards, born, which last word turns again to the opening Turning.
When fully articulated, each of our highlighted words gyre, mere, surely, hour, turns to the rough beast’s snarling revelatory r sound. Maybe this makes for too crude a conclusion, but if the rational visible world is disintegrating, articulating sounds on half-conscious levels must, surely, be half-grasped to make sense of the new future. Even if we pay no conscious attention to sound, in other words, by working in sound even a futuristic predictive poem like this doesn’t go out of date. Not by rational assembly, but by organic force each time it is read its continual present plumbs a terrifying pattern deep beneath the disorder. That is one reason literature is news that stays news.
Adrian Paterson
Dr Adrian Paterson is Lecturer in English at the University of Galway, writing on modern literature and culture. Currently President of Modernist Studies Ireland, he is on the board of directors at Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society in Galway, curator of the multimedia exhibition Yeats & the West, co-editor with Charles I. Armstrong and Tom Walker of the forthcoming Edinburgh Companion to W.B. Yeats and the Arts (2024) and with Christine Reynier of two E-rea special issues on modernist non-fictional prose (2018, 2020).
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed, And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed: But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st, So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. William Shakespeare, 1564–1616 ref: The Oxford Shakespeare: Poems. 1914.
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
HE child and the old man sat alone
In the quiet, peaceful shade
Of the old green boughs, that had richly grown
In the deep, thick forest glade.
It was a soft and pleasant sound,
That rustling of the oak;
And the gentle breeze played lightly round
As thus the fair boy spoke: -
"Dear father, what can honor be,
Of which I hear men rave?
Field, cell and cloister, land and sea,
The tempest and the grave: -
It lives in all, 'tis sought in each,
'Tis never heard or seen:
Now tell me, father, I beseech,
What can this honor mean?"
"It is a name - a name, my child -
It lived in other days,
When men were rude, their passions wild,
Their sport, thick battle-frays.
When, in armor bright, the warrior bold
Knelt to his lady's eyes:
Beneath the abbey pavement old
That warrior's dust now lies.
"The iron hearts of that old day
Have mouldered in the grave;
And chivalry has passed away,
With knights so true and brave;
The honor, which to them was life,
Throbs in no bosom now;
It only gilds the gambler's strife,
Or decks the worthless vow."
by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
"George Edmunds' Song is reprinted from The Poems and Verse of Charles Dickens. Ed. F>G> Kitton. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903.
HE wind blew high, the waters raved,
A ship drove on the land,
A hundred human creatures saved
Kneel'd down upon the sand.
Threescore were drown'd, threescore were thrown
Upon the black rocks wild,
And thus among them, left alone,
They found one helpless child.
A seaman rough, to shipwreck bred,
Stood out from all the rest,
And gently laid the lonely head
Upon his honest breast.
And travelling o'er the desert wide
It was a solemn joy,
To see them, ever side by side,
The sailor and the boy.
In famine, sickness, hunger, thirst,
The two were still but one,
Until the strong man droop'd the first
And felt his labors done.
Then to a trusty friend he spake,
"Across the desert wide,
Oh, take this poor boy for my sake!"
And kiss'd the child and died.
Toiling along in weary plight
Through heavy jungle, mire,
These two came later every night
To warm them at the fire.
Until the captain said one day
"O seaman, good and kind,
To save thyself now come away,
And leave the boy behind!"
The child was slumbering near the blaze:
"O captain, let him rest
Until it sinks, when God's own ways
Shall teach us what is best!"
They watch'd the whiten'd, ashy heap,
They touch'd the child in vain;
They did not leave him there asleep,
He never woke again.
by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
"George Edmunds' Song is reprinted from The Poems and Verse of Charles Dickens. Ed. F>G> Kitton. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903.
OW beautiful at eventide
To see the twilight shadows pale,
Steal o'er the landscape, far and wide,
O'er stream and meadow, mound and dale!
How soft is Nature's calm repose
When ev'ning skies their cool dews weep:
The gentlest wind more gently blows,
As if to soothe her in her sleep!
The gay morn breaks,
Mists roll away,
All Nature awakes
To glorious day.
In my breast alone
Dark shadows remain;
The peace it has known
It can never regain.
by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
"George Edmunds' Song is reprinted from The Poems and Verse of Charles Dickens. Ed. F>G> Kitton. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903.
Van Gogh's Undergrowth with Ivy, 1889 Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Van Gogh's Tree Trunks with Ivy, 1889 Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands
The Ivy Green
Oh, a dainty plant is the Ivy green,
That creepeth o'er ruins old!
Of right choice food are his meals, I ween,
In his cell so lone and cold
The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed,
To pleasure his dainty whim:
And the mouldering dust that years have made
Is a merry meal for him.
Creeping where no life is seen,
A rare old plant is the Ivy green.
Fast he stealeth on, though he wears no wings,
And a staunch old heart has he.
How closely he twineth, how tight he clings
To his friend the huge Oak Tree
And slyly he traileth along the ground,
And his leaves he gently waves,
As he joyously hugs and crawleth round
The rich mould of dead men's graves.
Creeping where no life is seen,
A rare old plant is the Ivy green.
Whole ages have fled and their works decayed,
And nations have scattered been;
But the stout old Ivy shall never fade,
From its hale and hearty green.
The brave old plant, in its lonely days,
Shall fatten upon the past:
For the stateliest building man can raise
Is the Ivy's food at last.
Creeping on where time has been,
A rare old plant is the Ivy green.
by Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
"George Edmunds' Song is reprinted from The Poems and Verse of Charles Dickens. Ed. F.G. Kitton. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903.
... Now, 200 years and 7 days after the birth of Charles Dickens, we look at the “rare old plant” which “slily” (snake-like) twists and twines around the greenwood tree: Ivy.
There’s nothing “rare” about ivy. Such words — including the two “daintys” in the first stanza — have less to do with describing ivy than with befriending it. The poem is loaded with these chummy terms of endearment; not just “dainty” (as in “excellent”), but stout (as in “strong”), staunch, rare, brave, hearty, hale and old. These are the words that sailors and ruffians sing in pubs to their fellow drunks — which is ironic, because “The Ivy Green” is recited in The Pickwick Papers not by a bunch of burly rogues, but by an old clergyman.
Composed with a healthy dose of hyberbaton (“ivy green,” “scattered been,” “fast he stealeth”), our “Ivy Green” — like Shakespeare’s “Greenwood Tree” — works best as music. Just read aloud the seventh line of all three stanzas. So rhythmically identical are they, so perfect for a pop-song, we could have Miley Cyrus sing them for us (“So I hopped off the plane at LAX” becomes “And the mouldering dust that years have made.”).
Yet here’s the wonder of it all: Sound and song, the visual arts and meaning — they’re constantly crossing over, changing sides. Sound creates sight, and sight creates sound, and meaning can’t live without this sort of constant synesthesia.
Let me explain what I mean: Vincent Van Gogh, the best of what can be called the “poet-painters” (Longfellow, Blake, Cummings, O’Hara, Tagore and so on) also befriended ivy. Sometimes ivy was a creative force: “Like the ivy on the walls, so my pen must cover this paper.” (I quote from van Gogh’s letters). Or a source of comfort, as when he described a new pair of black gloves as “good like ivy, good like going to church.” But equally, he saw ivy as a kind of killer, a strangler, an agent of death: “Illnesses…are perhaps to man what ivy is to the oak.”
He admired “The Ivy Green,” and even quoted two lines of the poem — from memory — to his brother Theo. (See one of the actual letters here). I say from memory because both lines are, in fact, misquoted, van Gogh preferring to follow meter rather than a direct transcription. “A strange [instead of "rare"] old plant is the ivy green;” and, most tellingly, from line 11, “which stealeth on though he wear no wings.”
Vincent recalls both lines in the same meter (iamb, iamb, anapest, iamb), whereas Charles’s line 11 is actually the most metrically unusual (five-footed, trochaic) of all the lines in the poem.
The point is this: The idea that ivy is like a snake (despite all those leaves, no winged angel, it!) — dangerous, untrustworthy, cold-blooded, slyly entwining an innocent oak — this idea no doubt resonated with van Gogh. But it’s the song that made it memorable to him; the song that produced the imprint in his mind.
That is to say, the song, the music — as much as text and meaning — creates the impression. If you look at van Gogh’s paintings of ivy, you can hear the leaves rustling in the wind. And if you recite Dickens’s “Ivy Green,” you glimpse the essence of that “rare old plant,” its duplicity, its ravenous hunger, its creepiness if you will, in a way that metaphor alone could never create. We sing out of dread, not love. Trying to appease the unappeasable, we make song.
“Ivy loves the trunk of the old oak tree,” writes van Gogh, “and so cancer, that mysterious plant, attaches itself so often to people whose lives were nothing but ardent love and devotion. So, however terrible the mystery of these pains may be, the horror of them is sacred, and in them there might indeed be a gentle, heartbreaking thing.”
Dickens, too, saw this sacred horror. It inhabits the undergrowth of everything he wrote, attaching itself to so many “heartbreaking things” in his books. Which is why “The Ivy Green” — a kind of snake-charmer’s hymn to death — is the perfect song for a clergyman after all.
Little lamb, who made thee?
HE child and the old man sat alone
OW beautiful at eventide
