The Second Coming Text Repsonse

“The Second Coming” from W. B. Yeats is a description that transcends the limits of poetic beauty to become a work of critical character. The poem transmits to the reader an atmosphere of chaos and destruction, this description chaotic of environment has a direct relationship with the cultural and political interwar period.

The poem has three common themes: 1) the presentation of chaotic motion as the bustle of the World War I destruction left in its wake, 2) the animal metaphor as a sign of irrationality and 3) treatment of topological aspects as description of the destruction.It is possible to construct an interpretation through historical analysis of the three aspects mentioned above. This essay attempts to move between these three themes to link them to historical events that marked the time the poem was written and its relationship with the destruction of European culture. The values on which European culture was based were suddenly wiped out, the ideals of liberalism, progress, and the unshakable faith in positivism are not only questioned, but the extreme violence is prevalent. This sense of destruction of bound denotes the character of the first line of description; of the chaotic motion.

The words of the poem draw a bustling atmosphere of brutal, confusing, a sense that attacks the reader with a description of the world's deepest decline. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer” (54) opens the doors to the first part of the poem. From the beginning, Yeats presents the chaotic motion of a humanity without direction. In a second step, anarchy and blood are presented as the new plague. “The anarchy is loosed” (54) and “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed” (54) goes beyond the chaotic motion can cover all the known, the very existence.

However, the chaotic moment is captured with the announcement of the second coming; this warning is the central point of the bustle, the constant uncertainty and the almost ubiquitous confusion to a future without hope. The move allows us to glimpse the loss of belief in a society ruined by war. The search for something they believe is futile, because the chaotic motion is permanently there, inherent in the new human condition of self-destruction, doom and disgust to itself. On November the 11th of 1918 World War I ended and it began a period f estrangement with the built. Until then, the situation is translated by Yeats decadent as a time where “the best lack all conviction” (54) and “the worst are full of passionate intensity” (54).

The chaotic motion is stressed to its limits when it shows contempt for the redeemer, that means that it assumes its non-existence, and instead the chaotic motion is condensed in the coming of a beast, spawned by the chaos of World War I. The loss of certainty about the future is presented as the latent danger of death end of humanity.It is especially important to highlight the presence of animal metaphors for cultural reason: irrationality emanated from the avant-garde. Given the chaotic motion at a specified location, the characters despise rationality in a world in decline, which does not need more because it has failed whereas animals play the role of enhancing the feeling of loneliness and disappointment.

The most attractive is the sphinx that emerges from the desert and is surrounded by “the shadows of the indignant desert birds” (55).Yeats might well have referred to the irrationality of war, the mythological monster that emerges suddenly, upsetting all around her environment and observes the world with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. The animal metaphor reaches its peak in announcing “The Second Coming” (55). An arrival with lack of hope and it will be a “rough beast” (55). So, the importance of the beast of Bethlehem, is to be a product of irrationality that replaces the redeemer.

But this substitution is not to save mankind, but is born of acts of this and comes from the uncertainty about the future.The relationship between uncertainty and animal nature lies in the irrationality. The chaotic motion becomes meaningful when integrated with a series of purpose-built environment to emphasize the relationship between chaos and destruction. The topological aspect is therefore a vital element of the poem and a need to understand the presence of deception and pessimism.

To raise the topological aspects described in the poem we must take into account four aspects directly related to the war: the radical change in the ap of Europe, killing millions of people, loss of civil liberties and the destruction of the values of progress science and liberalism. By 1919, the year the poem was written, Europe is facing the disappearance of the conventional power; on the one hand, the creation of new nation states such as Poland and Yugoslavia, on the other, the disappearance of central and eastern European powers such as Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire. The map of Europe has two features around 1920, the search for affirmation of life and the loss of a glorious past of the great powers of central and eastern.A halo of confusion pervades the very constitution of Europe. Thus, the death of 2. 5 million people in the West is joining in real terms, the loss of the past; literally, a generation in Europe disappeared brutally.

The remaining socially acceptable to a military machine that demanded the loss of their most basic freedoms and reversed the changes caused by liberal ideas led to feelings of helplessness among the lower classes by the wars, those who had to pay the costs of rationalization food and maintaining the war machine.Finally, combining the three elements mentioned above refers to the abolition of the securities. The progress has not only generated wealth, but which was also to blame for a series of advances in weapons that kill more people much faster. Also positivism proved his inability to stop scientific progress in respect of military development. The disappointment was complete, the pessimism prevailed in the common sense.

So, the topological aspects described in the poem present two aspects, loss and disappointment; almost as unlit motive.The clear sign above is a description of where chaotic motion is present; so to say, the horrific vision of “Spiritus Mundi” (55). You can find disappointment environments, harsh and sad, like “the desert” (55). It is also possible to find attachment to the past environments and the loss of the glory of the old order, either by the termination of the ceremony of innocence or the loss of “twenty centuries of stony sleep” (55) “vexed to nightmare” (55). It is this concept of “Spiritus Mundi” which is able to notice the centrality of the topics of disappointment, which could well be seen as Europe after the First World War.