Thinking Activity:The Second Coming by W.B.Yeats

Hello Readers

Welcome friends. After completing the unit on W.B.Yeats’  poem our prof. Dr Dilip Barad Sir  gave us a task as our thinking activity. This blog is a response for that.

Analysis of "The Second Coming” as a Pandemic Poem

Original Poem

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 intensityI.

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?

William Butler Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" a hundred years ago, when the world seemed on the verge.The losses of the First World War were still overwhelming when millions more began to die in the waves of a flu pandemic, which infected Yeats's wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, while she was pregnant. She and their child would survive.

We can say that Yeats's poem was published in November 1920. And over the century since, perhaps no poem has been more invoked for vexing times, to convey, in Yeats's own incomparable words, that:

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.

His wife caught the virus and was very close to death. The highest death rates of the 1918–19 pandemic were among pregnant women—in some areas, it was an up to 70 percent death rate for these women.So here we found this poem as pandemic.It was a very terrible situation as we are facing today because of CORONA pandemic.

Also we can find two lines from this poem that we can connect with pandemic.

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

To conclude we can say that the poem 'The second coming' is a Pandemic poem.

Here is the video recording of this poem by Prof. Dilip Barad sir.