Close Reading of a Passage

“The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature.  I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body.  For this I had deprived myself of rest and health.  I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.  Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep.”

 http://quercuscalliprinos.blogspot.com/2011/05/despair-guilt-and-remorse-in.html

                This excerpt proved vital to me thus far into the book.  So far the two major controlling ideas are: Victor reanimating a dead body, and his guilt for the adverse affects of playing God.  The concept of thinking something will make you happy for longer than you anticipate such as the car you drive, size of your house, or paycheck was a major theme of my English 101 class, and is somewhat relatable to the psychology of Victor in Frankenstein.   My English 101 class read a book “Discovering PopularCulture” that discussed the American Dream and overall happiness.  Many authors depicted what Americans’ defined happiness as, and why they were wrong to think something material would make them happy for as long as they think.   I find this relatable to Victor because of how he went about his creation.  He deprived himself sleep and health because he was so sure that the product of his hard work would yield success far out weighing any trials he would endure in the process of creating the monster.  Like many Americans who swear on a new car being that thing they so badly need to feel truly happy and remain in a fantasizing state that blocks out the reality of potential consequences, Victor remains so engulfed in his work he fails to forecast any negative outcome that may be the verdict of his action.  Victor defined his health and happiness’s around the construction of his creation, and now that it has been constructed and so many things are going so terribly wrong he spends his days now wishing it away.  I believe the overwhelming guilt and sorrow for his actions leading to the death of two loved ones will play out to influence the rest of the story as a new controlling idea.

Essay 2

Atrox

            The seriousness of the tone does not leisurely progress, for it too fears.  The world’s surety of tomorrow is gone, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre” (line 1).  The vocabulary bank lacks words to continue a rhyme scheme that depicts the atrocity of “The Second Coming”.  All that starts must come to an end; it’s the prophecy of the wicked end.  The world is victim to what we created.  Your Second Coming is here, a new age awaits you and the “rough beast” (line 21) is here to rule.  Yeats calls to elements of literature several times to evoke the otherwise impossible message of the spiraling world he is clinging too.

            A vivid picture is the product of the first stanza.  Objects are used to create meaningful and enticing realization such as a falcon that has ventured so far down its flight plan it no longer tamed by its falconer, as it should be.  The event of a falconer losing their falcon is by all means tragic, but tragic for them personally, the world remains stable despite one falconer’s gaping heart (line 2).  However, when such a personal tragedy is used to describe everyone, everything, the world; we all feel the anguish of that falconer loosing what defines them.  “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” (lines 7-8), the once majestic falconer has been brought down to nothing without his falcon, those who lacked the willpower to master such a feat as forming a pact with a wild predator have never been so optimistic at this great expense.

            Do you dare place hope in the uncertain?  A new age is rapidly approaching; not concerned about a fair landing zone.  Is it Armageddon?  Is there anything else that can be lost besides mere hope in such a crisis?  You want The Second Coming so bad you can see it, is it real?  “Hardly are those words out when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight” (lines 11-14).   It’s here, what you wanted so terribly bad, but now you don’t want it.  Your faith has been extinguished by the “rough beast” (line 21).  Yeats begs your imagination with personification in the second stanza when he gives a naturally innocent thing cruel human domineer, “A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” (line 15).  The sun makes an appearance everyday making life possible, yet Yeats gives it a human trait of “pitiless”.            

             Just as Yeats turned on the sun; in the third and final stanza he signifies through his hopeless voice that the last twenty centuries of potential progress made was in vein, “vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle” (line 20).  Yates equipped with imagery replicates his final hellish realization that during this progress a beast harnessing the Armageddon for the last twenty century’s of progress had been brewing.  The stanza has a voice about it like someone falling to their death finds everything to make shocking sense all at once.  Even though it’s a blunt few seconds before they indent the Earth with their life, so many things all come together to make regrettable sense. 

            William Butler Yeats embarked on potentially the scariest time of the world.  Nothing was guaranteed, not even the next moment.  The pain of losing centuries of logic, democracy, and discrepancy has not returned to the magnitude he so vividly describes with his bold tone, imagery, and personification.  The whole ordeal expressed in the poem might not be something describable in traditional communication, perhaps he resorted to these literary elements to provide body language you associate with his words to understand in depth what he was proclaiming that he was unable to summon with his petrified body. 

 

Works Cited

            Yates, William Butler “The Second Coming”. Poetry Foundation. 1989. 14 September 2011. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/search/?q=the+second+coming

-I'm not sure if I got the works cited/internal citations correct. I'm open to all criticism.

The Second Coming

A Second Coming Analysis

After reading the collection of poems, I remained most interested in “A Second Coming”.   Poetry is hard for me to enjoy.  Several times it was briefly covered throughout grade school; all resulting in perplexing headaches.  The only thing I proved to myself I had retained was noticing specific words or phrases capitalized in the middle of a text that would not otherwise be capitalized.  In the second stanza of the poem “The Second Coming” is as previously stated capitalized; indicating a reference to significance, name or title, ect.  I’m by no means a speculator of theology, however; I do recall associating the phrase The Second Coming to Jesus returning to Earth, beyond that, I will have  to ask Google.

I feel the first stanza really paints a vivid picture that depicts how someone who just experienced the absolute anguish of the First World War feels.  I imagine based on the first stanza the world was an unsure place that felt like it was out of synch; nothing was as it should be.  It’s as if the author witnessed the Earth’s crust split open and watched Hell’s contents ransack the world.  The joy in the world the author lived for was extinguished by this event and replaced by the worst possible opposite.

The rest of the poem is tough for me to breakdown and depict.  I don’t see any bright light at the end of this tunnel so to speak.  I think William Yeats was foreshadowing the religious belief of Armageddon.  I find it harder to relate to him.  I certainly believe the world at that time conveyed to people living during the event of the World War the end was near, a sense of desperation and dire need of a higher power to fix the injustice and restore the world to its previous state.

Photo Credit: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwM_eKr0G-1ac4HXlLos8JDGMbJ4CVnE3f_bIFaYPgfdLLw5ArNS9-bBAA0UPVKWyfhme_fXx-CKeVlv_43qAhJBqAGzaa7_flDBsA-ybtIm_hxheOX1EHVk0xGyqIXgJEd3YDIQEuamA/s1600/armageddon.jpeg