For those who surely know catastrophe is to come, I commend the initial section of Helen Vendler’s essay, “Loose Quotes” (in the journal, Liberties). Here, Vendler disrupts the understanding many of us have had about the familiar crisis lines opening “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats. She begins with the full poem and I quote Vendler’s analysis thereafter at length. I conclude with an upshot.
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?
W.B. YEATS
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
….
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
In every crisis they appear, those famous and familiar lines from “The Second Coming,” written in 1919 by W. B. Yeats. Journalists and critics alike seem to take them as final assertions of Yeats’ own beliefs. Such innocent judgments do not ask why those lines open the poem, or for how long their assertions remain asserted. The poem itself has become lost behind the quotability of its opening lines. And Yeats, it seems, wants to be a pundit.
In our ready “yes, yes” to those lines, we think we are accepting the judgment of a sage, but by the time we reach the close of the poem — which is a question, not an assertion — we are driven to imagine the changing states of the writer composing this peculiar poem, and we raise questions. . .In order to understand this poem, to free it from its ubiquitous misuses, and to restore it to both its opening grandeur and its subsequent humiliation, those are the questions that we must answer. . . .
“The Second Coming” is a lurid refutation of the lurid Christian expectations of the Second Coming of Christ, which Jesus himself foretells in Matthew 29-3:
Immediately after the distress of those days, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will refuse her light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will rock; and then the sign of the Son of Man will be seen in heaven; then it is that all the tribes of the land will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming upon the clouds of heaven, with great power and glory.
Yeats proposes a surreal alternative to Jesus’ prophecy, proposing that on the Last Day we will see not Christ in majesty but a menacing, pitiless, and coarse beast who “slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.” “After us, the savage god,” Yeats had said as early as 1896. He watched through the decades, appalled by the sequential horror of world events: The World War from 1914-1918; the failed Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916; the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. And his first assertions in “The Second Coming” are indeed thoughts prompted by such political upheavals. . . .
The quotability of Yeats’ opening passage derives, of course, from the total and unmodified confidence of its initial reportage, impersonal and unrelenting, offering a naked list of present-tense events happening “everywhere.” Stripped to their kernels, these are Yeats’s truculently unmitigated hammer-blows of grammar:
The falcon cannot hear
Things fall apart
The centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed
Everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity
The break, after Yeats’ introductory eight-line block, leads an educated reader to expect that a six-line block will follow, completing a sonnet [of 14 lines]. Yet the poet finds himself unable to maintain his original jeremiad, which has been aggressive, omniscient, panoramic, and prophetic. Yeats “begins over again,” and utters in the fourteen lines following the break a complete second “sonnet,” a rifacimento of the one originally intended, in which he rejects his earlier rhetoric of impersonal omniscience as inauthentic from his human lips. Who is he to speak as though he could see the world with the panoramic scan proper only to God? That so many successive writers have been eager to reissue his lines reveals how greatly the human mind is seduced by the vanity of the unequivocal. Can we requote without unease what the poet himself immediately rejected?
Although “The Second Coming” begins with an attempt at couplet-rhyme, soon — as Peter Sacks has pointed out to me — the couplets begin to disintegrate, as though they themselves were intent on demonstrating how “things fall apart”. . .The second, revisionary octave replaces the certainty of the poet’s original octave with the self-defensive uncertainty of “Surely.” Longing for a revelation more humanly reliable than an unsupported façade of godlike prophecy, Yeats insistently utters his second “Surely,” one no less dubious than the first. The second “Surely” attempts to locate a cultural myth to which he can attach the vision vouchsafed to him in a revelation arising within his human consciousness. “Surely the Second Coming is at hand. / The Second Coming!”
For the first time in the poem, we hear Yeats speaking in the first person, declaring that “a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight.” The poet is the sole spectator of this vast image, and he claims that it stems not from his own bodily sense of sight but from the World Spirit, a universal Spiritus Mundi always potentially able to rise into human awareness. (Poets so often describe the initial inspiration for a poem as something coming unbidden that the reader is not troubled by Yeats’ myth of a World-Spirit supplying the image for his revelation.) The poet has decided that it is more honest, more tenable, to write in the first person, to present himself as one whose imagination has reliably generated a telling and trustworthy “vast image” of his historical moment. He has forsaken his impressive but fraudulent rhetoric of omniscience for an account of his private inspiration.
Once Yeats has repudiated his initial “divine” posture as a guaranteed seer-of-everything-everywhere, he can take on, in the first person, his limited historical image-making self and create with it a “human” sestet for his newly “remade” sonnet. Admitting the fallibility of any transient metaphorical image, he acknowledges that his image vanishes, “the darkness drops again,” and he is left alone. Yet he grandly maintains, in spite of his abandoning a prophetic stance, that he now definitely “knows” something.
The “something” turns out to be a single historical fact: the exhaustion of Christian cultural authority after its “twenty centuries” of rule. His “vast image” — its nature as yet unspecified — has shown him that Christianity will be replaced by a counter-force, a pagan one. Drawing on his reading of [Giambattista] Vico and Herbert Spencer, Yeats believed that history exhibited repetitive cycles of opposing forces. Just as Christianity overcame the preceding centuries of Egypt and Greece, now it is time for some power to defeat Christianity.
In his private “revelation” the poet has seen the Egyptian stone sphinx asleep “somewhere” in sands of a desert. (The uncertain “somewhere” admits the loss of the initial “everywhere” of Yeats’ prophetic opening.) The “stony sleep” of the Sphinx has lasted through the twenty centuries of Christianity, but now Fate has set an anticipatory cradle rocking in Bethlehem, birthplace of the previous god, and a sphinx-like creature rouses itself to claim supremacy:
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle…
Although the poet “knows” that Christianity is undergoing the nightmare of its death-throes, he cannot declare with any confidence what will replace it. He can no longer boast “I know that…”: he can merely ask a speculative question which embodies his own mixed reaction of fear and desire to the vanishing of a now outworn Christianity, the only ideological system he has ever known. What will replace the Jesus of Bethlehem, he asks, and invents a brutal and unaesthetic divinity, a sphinx seen in glimpses — “with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun”. . .The indignant birds, their movement in the sky inferred from their agitated cast shadows, “reel about,” disoriented, projecting, as surrogates, the poet’s own indignation as he guesses at the future parallel upheaval of his own world. . .:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
(Accessed online at https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/loosed-quotes/?cache_busting=6ac95a404e605 and appearing in Chapter 1 of Helen Vendler (2025). Inhabit the Poem: Last Essays. Library of America: New York, NY)
The upshot for me? What makes this a fine poem for Vendler is that its narrative of feeling also opens up to “an analysis of the origin and evolution of such feelings” (2025, xii). Fear and dread driving crisis narratives are, in contrast, more third-person societal and less nuanced than first-person uncertain–at least for this policy analyst.
