The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats
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 convictions, 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?
This is a very well-known poem that has deals with similar concepts as Lord of the Flies
Yeats believed that history moved in thousand year cycles and, after World Wars I and II, that the Western or European era was ending. From the chaos of that end would come a new beginning.
Questions
The image of the falcon and the falconer begins the poem. Draw a picture of what Yeats means?
What happens over time, as the bird gets further away from the falconer?
Define the word "Gyre"
When the center cannot hold, what happens?
What happens to the ceremony of innocence?
What drowns it?
What could be an example of an innocent ceremony?
What is happening to the world?
What happens to the "best"?
What happens to the "worst"
What is "The Second Coming"?
What is supposed to happen there?
What image does Yeats see out in the desert?
Why is it having a nightmare?
Why is a cradle doing it?
Where in the world, today, are "things falling apart"?
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