The Second Coming

"The ceremony of innocence is drowned...."

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?

World War I ended on this day, 108 years ago. Yeats wrote this poem in January following the first Armistice Day. Criticism of the poem usually focuses on Yeats’ mythology, because it created the structure of his reinvention as a poet in roughly the last quarter of his life. His theory of history; the importance of the “gyres;” his mystical visions; all important stuff in Yeatsian studies. But I think this poem is also a reaction to the war that turned Europe into a charnel house, and created the “Lost Generation” of poets and writers who came on as Yeats was becoming an eminence grise. I’m not advocating a grand new critical theory for reading Yeats. I’m just pointing out this famous poem has a temporal, as well as canonical, location.

Strip away the theory of history, and you have a response to the horrors of that war. It certainly loosed “the blood dimmed tide” on Europe and England (Yeats lost no love for the English, but no one could set aside the slaughter of a generation of young men); “the ceremony of innocence” was certainly drowned. Ask the “Lost Generation.” They thought it so awful that they wondered if, indeed, a revelation was at hand: a disclosure, a revealing, of the true way of things. They thought it did; that’s why they were “lost.”

And the vision out of Spiritus Mundi of the rough, rude beast, may be a metaphor of apocalypse; or it may be a recognition of the loss of European civilization which had seemed so orderly and stable until July, 1914. The Lost Generation thought it an irretrievable loss, too. But Yeats connects it to history in what doesn’t have to be a mystical interpretation of history; just an acknowledgment of cause and effect. In Yeats’ cyclical theory of history even the cycles are not inexorable forces of a mad clockwork, but a product of causation, in this case the reaction of evil to the presence of good. So “twenty centuries of stony sleep” are “vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.” Or July, 1914 was not sui generis, but the result of causes that exploded into war. And while Yeats couldn’t have foreseen it in 1919, Armistice Day 1918 would only postpone the conclusion of “The Great War” and its causes, with the punishment of Germany the “rocking cradle” that only a quarter of a century later was the next, and even worse, rough beast, that slouched across Europe to be born. Born with even more terrible consequences. Evil and good are not so easily separated, and good conquering evil may leave the world better than it might have been; but it also leaves consequences that may take twenty centuries to recognize. Arguably, that conflict has just shifted continents; but the blood dimmed tide has yet to go back out.

Every act, especially those we deem acts of history, has consequences. That, too, is a lesson of the poem; and of Armistice Day. Not because of the day; but because of how we kept it. At least for the first 25 years. And how have we kept it since?