The Second Coming -- WB Yeats

[aliothsan]

This poem became one of my favorites when Raffi brought it up, turning it from something I vaguely remembered to something I've memorized. (Full text behind the cut at the bottom.)

Just now it occurred to me one of the reasons I like this poem so much: although it's supposedly in the traditional iambic pentameter, Yeats plays just fast and loose enough with the meter that it really feels like the ravings of a mad prophet. And, if I may, it echoes the theme of "everything we think so constant is starting to break up", in a less obvious/retarded way than starting out in strict meter and gradually dropping meter, rhyme, line length, and even punctuation and spelling at the bitter end. (If you saw a poem do that, wouldn't it just scream "bad emo poetry"? Totally unacceptable.)

Zooming in a bit, I particularly like the cadence of the first two lines, because the first line gives an allusion of being in a completely different meter:

• TUR ning and TUR ning in the WI de ning GYRE -- it sounds like dactylic tetrameter!
  (Dactyl = STRONG-weak-weak.)

But if you cast the same line into strict iambic pentameter it sounds totally wrong:

• tur NING and TUR ning IN the WIDE ning GYRE -- ugh! Not only do you have to interpret the two turnings differently, but you have to cram widening into two syllables.

Whereas, the second line fits perfectly into iambic pentameter:

• the FAL con CAN not HEAR the FAL con ER

So taken together, the first two lines play with your meter-perception in a very interesting way. Of course, consider these three lines from later on in the poem:

• The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
• The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out (/ When a vast image...)
• (a vast image... /) Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

Just try reading those as "weak STRONG, weak STRONG, weak STRONG..." It just doesn't work. (Somewhere in sands of the desert is begging to be spoken like the first line, in dactyls.)
Now speak the lines aloud as if talking normally. Yeats forces you to read the lines as sentences, not as lines. Not only does it convince you that things are, in fact, falling apart; it's a sneaky cure to Middle-School Shakespeare Syndrome. Take any group of kids and introduce them to iambic pentameter, then have them read some Shakespeare. You'll have them stuttering and overenunciating the stresses and speaking each line separately, instead of just reading it and letting it flow smoothly like it's supposed to. Middle-School Shakespeare Syndrome applies to an awful lot of poetry (and not just poetry in iambic pentameter, either!). But it's awfully hard to make it apply to The Second Coming.


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 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?