The Second Coming
by WH Auden
Analysed and Read by Chris Williams
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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?
Click HERE for Chris's reading.
When I was in my last year of O Levels (remember them?), a student teacher came to Ferndale Grammar School and was given the task of teaching the English Literature class. She tried to instil in us a love of Yeats. On the whole she failed miserably, as the class recognised a doe in the headlights and acted appropriately for a pack of young predators.
That wasn't the moment that I decided that, whatever job I ended up doing in life, it wasn't going to be teaching. I'd experienced the pack scenting blood many times before then. However, sometime during the short period that this victim was being tortured (I can't remember her name, but she has remained in my memory as small, fair and pretty), she gave me The Second Coming.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight
It was about this time that I'd started writing poetry myself, along with a friend of mine. The Second Coming didn't start me, that fault lies with Leonard Cohen, but maybe it allowed me to see possibilities I hadn't seen before. It has remained with me and also, it seems, with other people, for so many of its phrases are familiar:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide
The ceremony of innocence
The best lack all conviction
And what rough beast
That last I have used at least twice in my own writing.
The Second Coming is full of symbols, Yeats loved symbols, and it is possible to analyse them at length. Indeed, I recently read a complete poems of Yeats where the editor did just that. It's been done; I'm not that interested in doing it again. Also, there's the Christian aspect but this, too, did not particularly resonate with me.
Sometimes, it's difficult to understand why something does resonate with you but, in the centre of that chaotic English Literature class, I met a rough beast and it has stayed with me since.
