![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer’.įalcons were used as hunting animals since the medieval era. It opens up with the disturbance of nature. In Yeats’ poem, the apocalypse is a much quieter, more understated, affair. Much has been written on the apocalypse, and many of those writings focus on the harbingers of the event: it is always bloody and massive, a vicious explosion that shakes the world to its foundation. The best lack all conviction, while the worst The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere Things fall apart the centre cannot hold This poem is the literary version of that: a lack of ability to think of a time before the war. The First World War had shaken the foundations of knowledge for many, and scarred from the knowledge of the ‘war to end all wars’, they could no longer reconcile themselves with a time before the Great War. Rife with Christian imagery, and pulling much inspiration from apocalyptic writing, Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’ tries to put into words what countless people of the time felt: that it was the end of the world as they knew it and that nothing else would ever be the same again. ‘The Second Coming’ was William Butler Yeats’ ode to the era. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |