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.