How Does Yeats Portray The Destruction Of Society?

People have foretold the end of the world for centuries, illustrating great destruction and dilapidation. The 1920’s, a time period full of these conjectures. World War 1 had just ended and the great depression would soon strike. What better time period than this to foresee the end times? One such apocalyptic prediction during this time period surfaced in the form of a poem, The Second Coming, written by William Butler Yeats.Though a rebellious view, the poem depicts a world falling apart due to its exposure to Christianity. He exposes us to a world which keeps progressing forward in time, the farther the world travels, the more it disintegrates. Through his work, The Second Coming, Yeats depicts the destruction of society resulting from Christianity’s
The first line in The Second Coming reads, “Turning and turning in the widening gyre”(1). The “gyre” Yeats refers to, represents two spirals in the shape of a cone, one inside the other. The idea being that the world is turning on the spiral heading towards the larger end, and once reached the world will start again at the inner spiral of the second cone. Yeats takes advantage of this illustration by using it to reveal that as the world grows farther away from the center, the more arduous a task holding it together becomes. Yeats then underscores the disconnect between the people of Earth using yet another paradox. Yeats states that, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” (7). The world is falling apart. People who know what they want to change about the world have no desire to work for the change they so desperately crave. While those who have a passion and drive, yearning to do the work, don’t know what they want to change, only know that something must change. And indeed, something must change. As the it continues its journey along the gyre the world cannot avoid falling to
The first allusion arrives early in the second stanza, “Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the second coming is at hand;”(9). If anything in the poem were to be classified as obvious, it would be the reference to the Bible in these two lines. Christianity often refers to the end of the world and the second coming of Jesus Christ simply as the second coming. The connection is explicit. Surely, the end of the world has arrived. The crisis and doubt in the world will come to an end; but eradicating this crisis comes at the cost of the increased crisis and devastation promised by The Second Coming. So, the end of the world is indeed caused by the christian Second Coming. but perhaps there is joy in the annihilation of society, and inevitably earth, as it brings an end to the suffering. The second example of allusion in The Second Coming holds within it perhaps some of the most essential lines in the poem. Within these lines Yeats prophesies, “That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by rocking cradle, and what rough beast, its hour come round at last slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” (19-22). After twenty centuries of sleep the rough beast has awoken from its slumber.The beast embodies the characteristics of the Sphinx, a pagan figure with strength, and ferocity. Instead of the christ expected, a harsh, malevolent beast greets the world. The beast the world