Allusion And Symbolism In The Second Coming By William Butler Yeats

” Adam and Eve, the garden, the serpent, the forbidden fruit. Every story about the loss of innocence is really about someone’s private reenactment of the fall from grace, since we experience it not collectively but individually and subjectively”. One example is the Garden of Eden where women tempt men and cause their fall. The apple is used as a symbolic object of temptation and a serpent is used to tempt men to do evil, and a fall from innocence. The Flood shows rain as a form of destruction and then it shows rainbows as a promise of restoration. The Apocalypse: Four Horseman of the Apocalypse usher in the end of the world. Biblical names often draw a connection between literary character and Biblical characters. Crist is also used symbolically. A Christ figure is good with children, employed as a carpenter, believed to have walked on water, very forgiving, believed to have spent time alone in the wilderness, believed to have had a confrontation with the devil, possibly tempted, thirty-three years of age when last seen. “You may not subscribe to this list, may find it too glib, but if you want to read like a literature professor, you need to put aside your belief system, at least for the period during which you read, so you can see what the writer is trying to

    The last three lines of the poem, "And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more, /Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied, / The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor," are the strongest. Yeats is saying that, although they are unhappy with their lives, they have not given up hope. They still feel that they can find perfect happiness. They realize that this happiness cannot be found in the lives they are currently living. Yeats often used the image of the cross or of Christ’s crucifixion to symbolize things such as "discord, incompleteness, opposition, mortality, temporality" (Ellmann and O'Clair, 135). With this line, he is saying that these people have given up hope that they will ever be happy in their hectic, strife-filled, material worlds. They are now turning to God in order to find some sense of peace and fulfillment in their lives. The

The study of any poem often begins with its imagery. Being the centralized idea behind the power of poetry, imagery isn’t always there to just give a mental picture when reading the poem, but has other purposes. Imagery can speak to the five senses using figurative language as well as help create a specific emotion that the author is trying to infuse within the poem. It helps convey a complete human experience a very minimal amount of words. In this group of poems the author uses imagery to show that humanity is characterized as lost, sorrowful and regretful, but nature is untainted by being free of mistakes and flaws and by taking time to take in its attributes it can help humans have a sense of peace, purity, and joy, as well as a sense of

We can be more specific and see what the poet and writer exactly talk about. It is better to focus on the poem first as it was written before the novel. In his poem William butler Yeats is shocked by the events which were happening during the First World War. “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned…”, he tries to picture the dark ages of the war and the nasty events which were happening by using some metaphors and similes such as “a shape with lion body and the head of man” or “shadows of the indignant desert birds” Therefore, he manage to transmit the terrifying atmosphere of his time to the reader. He can not stand this state of fairs so he thinks that it is the end and he hopes that it is time for the second coming of Christ.

The poem Revelation, by Liz Lochead, is a gripping story about a chance encounter that leads the reader into a deeper understanding of the poem’s underlying theme. The poem focuses on a girl who is visiting a farm and is given the opportunity to see a bull that is kept out of sight. Lochhead manages to grasp the reader’s imagination by the use of word choice, sentence structure, imagery and personification. This allows the reader to visualize the recurring theme of sexual awakening within the poem. Liz Lochhead, creates a deeper understanding of the poem’s theme by her word choice, which helps explain the events leading up to the young girl’s encounter with the bull. She uses the word ‘threshold’, which describes the girl standing at the opening of the barn. The word has connotations of a crossover from innocence to experience. At this point in time the girl is standing at the edge of purity, about to step over to the other side revealing something unknown to her. This describes to the reader that she has reached the stage in her life where she is ready to be exposed to her sexual awakening and the evil that is prominent in the world. The writer then builds on this motif by the way she structures the poem in the lead up to the girl meeting the bull. In stanza one she adds ‘the hot reek of him. Then he was immense’. The use of the caesura adds a dramatic effect to the poem causing the reader to pause, instilling fear. It makes the reader realise that this isn’t just a chance encounter after all, as it has a great impact on the young girl. From this one encounter the girl remembers the bull’s overwhelming smell & body heat.

In the first stanza Yeats expresses his conflicting loathing and admiration for modernity through the juxtaposition of “vivid faces” and “grey houses”. This represents the possibilities that modernity can bring; the revitalising of the community or the destruction of tradition and age old energy already lost by the modifications in the city. The repetition of the phrase “A terrible beauty is born” in the first and fourth stanzas articulate this inner turmoil revolving around modernity. This oxymoronic declaration is emphasised throughout the text by Yeats’ confusion towards the rebellion and its necessity. The fourth stanza embodies this conflict, removing the previously represented idea that life in pre-rebellion Ireland was a “casual comedy”, alluding to an Elizabethan play where the characters were content. By asking the rhetoric questions “was it needless death” and “O when may [British rule] suffice?” Yeats parallels the unresolved contradiction of “terrible beauty”. However, this sensitive treatment of conflict allows the retainment of ambiguity and can be related to any change within life, hence allowing audiences to superimpose their own beliefs and ideas into the poem. Yeats continues to explore his aversion towards modernism in The Second Coming with the appointment of a new “gyre” standing as the symbol for a new age. The fear of

The question of whether good can be separated from evil is integral to the text of The Second Coming. In as much as it is not one’s interest to uncover the events of Yeats’ generation, it is necessary to note that the poem was written at a time during wars. Arguably, there seemed not to be any ‘good guys’ that time as every country was sending its men to war where they had to live in trenches for months. Worse still, the wars that time were motivated by minor issues such as disagreements over small patches of territorial land. Throughout the poem, the implication is that the society has gone to a wrong way, so much that people do not care to act responsibly. A situation is depicted at the beginning where the falcon, understood to be a symbol of tradition and nobility is deaf and

Poetry is used to express several different mediums through: structure, tone, imagery and rhyme schemes. John Keats’s ode “To Autumn” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” or, a Vision in a Dream” will be critically analyzed, compared and contrasted to each throughout this paper to further dissected the meaning of each poem.

In the poem “The Second Coming”, by William Butler Yeats. He writes this poem after World War I, around 1919. Yeats is a Irish poet, who came from Protestant parentage. The over all theme of the poem is that God will come back again. There are many versions to how God will appear, but in this poem bad things happen first in order for God to come. In “The Second Coming,” Yeats uses symbolism to unfold the meaning of the poem.

What light does this comment of Yeats’ shed on his poetry? Feel free in your answer to concentrate on poetic devices other than rhythm if you prefer.

Possibly due to the war efforts in WWI, people saw the destruction and the lack of progression it brought the world; a "second coming" of the "rough beast…/slouching towards Bethlehem" (Yeats, Longman p. 2329, ll. 21-22), or in other words "slouching towards" religion.  I think this because earlier in his stanza, Yeats speaks about "twenty centuries of stony sleep/ Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle" (Yeats, Longman p. 2329: ll. 19-20), which leads me to think of the two thousand years religion had a grip on people's lives, and then as the more Modern generation became more and more separated from religion by its "rocking cradle," the "rough beast" took hold of the people and took the place of religions dominancy in society.  Now, people's ideas became separated from the Biblical interpretation of things, and instead took on a more personal outlook and interpretation of its own as to what the meaning of all these things (WWI) meant.  Chaos then took place, and religion lost its stronghold for good.  The "centre [could]not hold" the people in religion, the "rough beast" (chaos) became their dominant concern.

On top of chasing an incredibly fragmented and disparate storyline, Barthelme incorporates or rather alludes to at least at one point the work of William Butler Yeats. In particular, Barthelme alludes to Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”, a dystopian work, much ahead of its time. Barthelme writes, “The center will not hold if it has been spot-welded by an operator…” (Barthelme 2817), alluding to Yeats’ line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;”. Yeats published “The Second Coming” shortly after the end of WWI, perhaps as a statement that the ending of that war harkened a frightening new age. On top of Yeats advancing a dystopian and alienating agenda in “The Second Coming”, this work was the one of the first to produce a basic manifesto

Other kinds of echoes, literary rather than poetic, emerge as well; Yeats connects "The Second Coming" with Shelley's Prometheus Unbound in lines 7 and 8, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity" (Drake 53), and even, Jeffares suggests, the Divine Comedy, by altering the "hawk" of an earlier draft to more closely resemble the "ample circuit" of a "falcon" described in Dante's masterpiece (A Commentary 241). Yeats surely made these allusions to borrow the literary scale of these prophetic masterpieces. But far more important in this respect is his borrowings from the Bible. Most central and obvious are the Second Coming of Christ described in Matthew 24 and the beast of the apocalypse from Revelations, but Purdy also notes "the vision chapters of Daniel (7-12)," "Isaiah's prophecy of the Day of the Lord (14.6-11, 19-22), 'old Ezekiel's cherubim' (10.1ff), and Jeremiah's denunciation of Isreal (2)" (75), not to mention Yeats' location of the beast's birth at Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ two thousand years ago (Jeffares, W. B. Yeats 38). The Bible is, of course, the western world's primary work of prophecy, and Yeats' use of its language gives his own work a tone of prophecy.

7) Nation shall rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom, and there shall be famines, pestilence'-t, and earthquakes in divers (unknown) places. 8) All these are but the beginning of sorrows.

William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” after World War 1 ended, in a time when the image of society was catastrophic. Yeats was deeply affected by these horrors caused by the war. Yeats predicts this image of a catastrophic society due to war will reappear in the near future. In “The Second Coming”, William B. Yeats uses a variety of literary devices to portray his idea of what the downfall of society will look like.