This blog is the response to the thinking activity on the 'W.B. Yeats poem' by Dr.Dilp Barad.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was born in Dublin. His father was a lawyer and a well-known portrait painter. Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but he spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family’s summer house at Connaught. The young Yeats was very much part of the fin de siècle in London; at the same time, he was active in societies that attempted an Irish literary revival. His first volume of verse appeared in 1887, but in his earlier period, his dramatic production outweighed his poetry both in bulk and in import. Together with Lady Gregory he founded the Irish Theatre, which was to become the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge. His plays usually treat Irish legends; they also reflect his fascination with mysticism and spiritualism. Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), The King’s Threshold (1904), and Deirdre (1907) are among the best-known.
After 1910, Yeats’s dramatic art took a sharp turn toward a highly poetical, static, and esoteric style. His later plays were written for small audiences; they experiment with masks, dance, and music, and were profoundly influenced by the Japanese Noh plays. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize. Whereas he received the Prize chiefly for his dramatic works, his significance today rests on his lyric achievement. His poetry, especially the volumes The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933), and Last Poems and Plays (1940), made him one of the outstanding and most influential twentieth-century poets writing in English. His recurrent themes are the contrast of art and life, masks, cyclical theories of life (the symbol of the winding stairs), and the ideal of beauty and ceremony contrasting with the hubbub of modern life.
The Second Coming :
One can well observe the frustration of Yeats Through his poems. I.e. ‘A prayer For My Daughter’ in which he satirizes his crush Maud Gonne, also in his poem ‘The Second Coming’ he aims at the beliefs of people who are waiting for God/rebirth of God.
The opening lines of the poem impart us a picture of the disintegration that has overtaken the Christian civilization. The diminishing force of Christianity is conveyed to us through the idea that Christianity is like a falcon - a symbol for a man who no longer hears the call of the falconer, i.e. God. As a result, the falcon has lost contact with the falconer and it becomes directionless. Things are falling apart and there is no stabilizing force. The shadow of disorder, lawlessness, and confusion is looming over the world. The "blood-dimmed tide" is the tide of violence. This tide has drowned the "ceremony of innocence".
The "ceremony of innocence" represents for Yeats those fanatical men who have seized power. The ruthless, full of passionate intensity of fanaticism seems to rule the whole world. As a result, the pure and best men have grown skeptical and they have lost all conviction.
The indication is that some new revelation or a new "coming" is near. The first revelation or the first coming was the birth of Jesus Christ which heralded the Christian civilization.
The phrase "Spiritus Mundi" stands for "spirit of the world". The Stoics used this phrase for the vital force of the universe but it should be noted that William Butler Yeats has employed it for a kind of corporate imagination similar to the racial subconscious described by psychologists.
In other words, the phrase "Spiritus Mundi" has caused to be the property of any personality that signs, even direct messages flow from "Spiritus Mundi" which the poet and the philosopher have only to see, hear, and recognize.
The Sphinx - the shape with the lion's body and the head of a man represents ruthless and merciless violence, "moving its thighs" conveys the clumsy, powerful, and stirring of the shape into life.The shadows of the desert birds reel away from it in the giddiness of a nightmare. As it shows things moving, birds over the desert see it and begin to scream.
During the twenty centuries of Christian civilization, this beast was sleeping but is about to make its appearance in the world. This will be the "Second Coming" and it will supersede Christ who was born two thousand years ago in Bethlehem.
The new period in Human history will be one of monstrous animal power. Thus, William Butler Yeats' 'The Second Coming" contains a "horror-vision" of the destruction of the world as we know it and the prophecy of an era of infinite and sheer cruelty and suffering.
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