William
Butler
Yeats
YouTube - It's the End of the World as We Know It (R.E.M)
• Born on June 13, 1865 in the seaside village of
Sandymount in Dublin, Ireland
• In 1884 he enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art,
where he published his first works
• Yeats met friend and lady patron Augusta Gregory in
1894 where his involvement in Irish literary theatre began
• In 1903 William Butler went on his first lecture tour of the
United States
• At the age of 73 William Butler Yeats died on January
28,1939
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?
Analysis
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•
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“TURNING and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the
falconer;” – sets up the chaos that the wind is so violent the falcon cannot
hear its master
"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of
innocence is drowned." – Yeats shows how the chaos and anarchy is
spreading throughout the world
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst, Are full of passionate
intensity.”– The best people in the world are lacking all conviction and the
worst people are fired with intense passion
• “Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at
hand” – Yeats shows the reality that the end of the world is
approaching
•
“The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight”– Yeats talks about an image of the “spirit of the world”
that worries him
Analysis
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•
•
•
•
•
•
“somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man”—
“ Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.”– shadows
of the birds reel around it
“The darkness drops again; but now I know “ – Dark fills the sky
“That twenty centuries of stony sleep”– Sphinx has been still for centuries
“Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle”– Sphinx’s sleep was
interrupted by terror of a baby in a cradle
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,”– Yeats uses the
words rough beast to describe a destructive being and that its arrival is
coming
“Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”– This beasts “slouches” to be
born in Bethlehem
Poetic Technique
• "The Second Coming" is written in very rough Iambic
Pentameter
• However the meter is very loose and there are so many
exceptions that the poem is more close to free verse
• There is no exact rhyming scheme other than the first
two rhyming couplets in the start of the poem
• The other rhymes are very coincidental like “man” and
“sun”
• Allusion
• Imagery
Does this poem give you hope or make you lose
hope for the future of our world?
What are three words you would use to describe
this poem?
What do you think was was Yeats intention to write
such a dark poem ?
Bibliography
•
“Explanation of: ‘The Second Coming’ by William Butler Yeats.” LitFinder
Contemporary Collection. Detroit: Gale, 2007. LitFinder. Gale. NORTH ALLEGHENY
SCHOOL DISTRICT. 12 May 2009
<http://go.galegroup.com/ps/start.do?p=LITF&u=pl2552>