The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats
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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
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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?
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Achebe titled his most
famous novel Things
Fall Apart (1958),
prefacing the book with
the poem's first four
lines. Achebe's novel
adheres to Yeats'
theme by illustrating the
sudden collapse of
African societies in the
age of European
colonialism.
What is colonialism?
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Definition: practice of ruling nations as
colonies: a policy in which a country rules
other nations and develops trade for its own
benefit
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Before the European invasion of Africa there
were over 800 distinct languages and many
diverse cultures.
The European invasion forever changed the
development of Africa.
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Achebe uses this opening stanza of William Butler
Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming,” from which the
title of the novel is taken, as an epigraph to the
novel.
In invoking these lines, Achebe hints at the chaos
that arises when a system collapses.
That “the center cannot hold” is an ironic reference
to both the imminent collapse of the African tribal
system, threatened by the rise of imperialist
bureaucracies, and the imminent disintegration of
the British Empire.
Achebe, writing in 1959, had the benefit of
retrospection in depicting Nigerian society and
British colonialism in the 1890s.
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Yet Achebe’s allusion is not simply political, nor is it
ironic on only one level. Yeats’s poem is about the
Second Coming, a return and revelation of sorts. In
Things Fall Apart, this revelation refers to the advent
of the Christian missionaries (and the alleged
revelation of their teachings), further satirizing their
supposed benevolence in converting the Igbo. For
an agricultural society accustomed to a series of
cycles, including that of the locusts, the notion of
return would be quite credible and familiar.
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The hyperbolic and even contradictory nature of
the passage’s language suggests the inability of
humankind to thwart this collapse.
“Mere anarchy” is an oxymoron in a sense, since
the definition of anarchy implies an undeniably
potent level of radicalism. The abstraction in the
language makes the poem’s ideas universal: by
referring to “[t]hings” falling apart as opposed to
specifying what those collapsing or disintegrating
things are.
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The hip hop group
The Roots titled
their 1999 album
Things Fall Apart
taking the name
from Achebe’s
novel.
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Why do you think
they would be
interested in titling
their album after
Achebe’s book?
Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart
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Born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe
The son of Isaiah Okafo, a Christian
churchman, and Janet N. Achebe
November 16, 1930 in Ogidi,
Nigeria.
He married Christie Chinwe Okoli,
September 10, 1961, and now has
four children: Chinelo, Ikechukwu,
Chidi, and Nwando.
He attended Government College in
Umuahia from 1944 to 1947
University College in Ibadan from
1948 to 1953.
He then received a B.A. from
London University in 1953 and
studied broadcasting at the British
Broadcasting Corp. in London in
1956.
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Things Fall Apart focuses
on Nigeria's early
experience with
colonialism, from first
contact with the British to
widespread British
administration.
"Chinua Achebe creates
in his novel a coherent
picture of coherence
being lost, of the tragic
consequences of the
African-European
collision,"
Robert McDowell
Look for Nigeria
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Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, is the
seminal African novel in English.
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Its most striking feature is to create a
complex and sympathetic portrait of a
traditional village culture in Africa.
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Achebe is trying not only to inform the outside
world about Ibo cultural traditions, but to
remind his own people of their past and to
assert that it had contained much of value.
All too many Africans in his time were ready
to accept the European judgment that Africa
had no history or culture worth considering.
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He also fiercely resents the stereotype of
Africa as an undifferentiated "primitive" land,
the "heart of darkness," as Conrad calls it.
Throughout the novel he shows how African
cultures vary among themselves and how
they change over time. Look for instances of
these variations as you read.
Themes
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Change vs. Progress
Impact of Colonialism
Moral Ambiguity
Masculinity
Tragic Flaw
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The religious beliefs of the Ibo people are very
different than Christians beliefs.
In summary the Ibo people believe:
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The supreme God or deity (Chukwa) who is most
powerful and controls fertility and creation. He is
represented by many other minor gods and sacrifices
are made through them.
Personal Gods (Chi) which are believed to be in control
of a person’s destiny.
Ancestors, these are often represented by masked men
(egwugwu) at social gatherings and are greatly
respected and worshipped. There is constant
interaction between the worlds of the living and the
dead.
This is a powerful indictment of the evils of imperialism. It reflects the brutal
oppression in the Belgian Congo. At the end of the story Conrad tells us of a man
named Kurtz, dying, insane, and guilty of atrocity and genocide.
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King Leopold II of Belgium organized in 1878, a private
commercial company, under the name of the International
Africa (Congo) Association. He was the president and the chief
stockholder. The purpose was the purchase of Congo land for
the exploitation of rubber resources. The king then secured
international sanction, at the Berlin conference (1884-1885) for
transforming the Company’s lands into the Congo Free State,
with himself as its personal sovereign. He earned great profits in
this undertaking. By 1908, the government of Belgium took over
the Congo Free State as a Belgian colony, on payment of liberal
financial compensation to Leopold II.