A jingle, a swoosh through the yellow canopy above our heads, and the patter of small feet, scuffling scared through the brown autumn leaves. Was that true? Can I trust my eyes?
A couple of days ago, I walked my dog in a large wildish park in the outskirts of the city, when I saw a man dressed in brown-green felt stalk through the undergrowth, on his bent arm a falcon – an actual falcon! – about to take off the little hood covering the bird’s face. Up rushed the animal with the graceful tinkling of the bell around its claws, and within the blink of an eye, a hare, well-hid among the dry leaves on the floor, dashed across the path, away into the next patch of bush, and the next after that.
Apart from the wonderful (and slightly unnerving) experience of encountering a falconer and his hunting falcon in a city of four million people, a poem suddenly popped into my head; that’s how those things work, don’t they; an external trigger, encouraging an internal response; a fragment unearthing itself from the sediments of memory, floating to the surface of consciousness.
The falcon, hare, falconer all disappeared between the thick shrubbery as miraculously as they had emerged; my thoughts kept circling like the bird around that one snatch of line… ‘the centre cannot hold’… I took my dog home, and pulled out the poem. It’s called ‘The Second Coming’ by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats. I read it, over and over and over again. I don’t know what it means, really. But it seems to be saying something about our moment. Its punctuation, it turns out, is a key part of its foreboding mood, and mighty force to lodge itself into the grooves of our brain, looping. Gyrating.
Here's my interpretation of what seems like an un-interpretable poem. With a couple of suggestions on semicolons thrown into the disorientating mix.
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Now, go back up, and read the poem again.
If you’re confused, you’re doing it right. This poem is confusing. It wants to confuse you. It resolutely refuses to dish out meaning, which is exactly why it’s such a magnet for us in disorientating upsetting times. You can’t conquer the poem. You can’t run at it, and wrest sense out of it. Maybe you need to approach it sideways, shuffle up towards it sneakily…‘by indirection find direction out’, Shakespeare has Polonius say in Hamlet. Emily Dickinson, herself the queen of indeterminacy, offers us ‘Tell all the truth, but tell it slant’. Let’s slant up to Yeats, and see what happens.
The poem has three stanzas of 8, 9, and 5 lines. There are mostly 10 syllables in each line, but the second and third stanzas can have 11, and 12. It’s unrhymed. That’s (almost!) all the technical stuff I mention, promise.
The first stanza describes a frightening process of ever-growing chaos and violence. The world is becoming undone at the seams, what’s holding us together is vanishing, leaving in its wake an anatomisation, a disintegration of the formerly whole. Moral inversion follows suit. The corrupt are loudest, the conscientious hesitate, quivering, passive.
So far so good. The second stanza feels distinctly wackier: Biblical languages and concepts enter the scene; the situation is so apocalyptic that the Last Judgement seems nigh (the ‘Second Coming’ of Christ); the speaker picks out an ominous creature in the distance; a mysterious nemesis, the sphinx, half-human, half-animal which the Egyptians call Abou al-Hol. The father of terror. Oedipus knew the monster’s merciless treachery.
The last stanza lifts itself to disturbing prophecy mode, riffing on Yeats’s esoteric system of beliefs that history moves in cycles of 2000 years, and since Christ was born in the year 0, his age was coming to an end in the 1920s when Yeats composed the poem, ushering in the new era of the rough beast – whatever that is and whatever it brings.
‘Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’ Notice the doubtful question mark, trailing the end almost like an after-thought, forcing our voice into rising intonation, but merely managing a vague kind of tentativeness. That’s at least how I feel every time I read the poem. I’m like “oh, I thought this was an exclamation, but I’m supposed to lift my voice here, okay, I’ll do it then”. It just doesn’t land. But that ambiguity is precisely the point, and would have been laughable in a lesser craftsman but Yeats.
Let’s return falcon-like to the beginning: the image of circularity governs our first encounter with the poem through the floating bird, drifting further and further away from its master. I was intrigued by the word ‘gyre’ – it sounds so oddly formal and foreign amid this medieval native English scene of the chase by bird. “Gyre” is from the Greek for “ring”, and also relates to Yeats’s mythology of spirals enlarging and reducing.
I love the rhythm of the first line ‘Turn-ing and turn-ing in the wi-dening gyre.’ The syllables in bold are stressed (or could be, there’s some flexibility here). It sounds like the chug-chuging of a train, imitating the rotation of the bird. And then of course the series of inspired semicolons:
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
That’s four semicolons in five lines. That’s a lot. If there’s one mark of punctuation that manages to elicit rivalling amounts of anger and joy to the exclamation mark, it must be the semicolon. If you’re a fan, you’ll liberally sprinkle your correspondence with it, creating a dreamy connective-tissue of thought-threads that may or may not be related enough to warrant continuation of the sentence while also existing as their own entities. If you hate the sign, you chisel your text one hard-edged sentence after another. The full stops drop like bombs. Yawning gaps of silence after each syntactical monument.
The semicolon is for when you want to stop – and go on. When the sense is complete – and continues. When things are separate – and together, piling on one another like beads on a string for prayer. In this first stanza of Yeats’s phenomenal poem, the semicolons function like the shutters of a camera, opening and closing and opening again, each time showing another manifestation of the horror taking hold of the world. Like the click-clicking of a turning kaleidoscope: you see new combinations of the same shapes every time you gyrate the tube. And it’s this accumulation that doesn’t leave space for breathing that’s so awful. There’s no relief anyway, no hiding.
The stanza follows a tight arrangement, lines mirroring one another in words (‘The falcon cannot hear’…’the centre cannot hold’…’anarchy is loosed’…‘the blood-dimmed tide is loosed’), and in structure: we have three passive tense constructions one after the other (‘is loosed’ twice and then ‘is drowned’). Some huge faceless power whirls around the world, sweeping us up in its evil without us seeing an actual body doing the deeds, someone to arrest, stop, and punish. Who unleashed anarchy? Who is the falconer? Where is the centre?
There are no answers. Just scary questions, and foggy premonitions.
¶
It took Yeats many months to hammer this out. Compare the random snippets of impressions in an earlier draft:
Ever more wide sweeps the gyre
Ever further the flies out ward
from the falconer’s hand. scarcely
is armed tyranny fallen when
When an the mob bred
take it place.
¶
A little later with struck-out lines:
Things fall apart—at every stroke of the clockOf innocence most foully put to death haveOld wisdom and young innocence has died The gracious and the innocent have
¶
An almost-finished version:
Things fall apart—the center cannot hold Wild Mere anarchy is loose through out the world
dim tide
The blood stained flood is loose & everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
uncertain
Yeats distils and distils until nothing but the essences remain. And those essences hold together - only just - through the (dis)connecting semicolons.
¶
Hewing away at words to arrive at bare form mirrors Yeats’s deliberate outtakes of historical references: in earlier drafts, we stumble across haughty queens like Marie Antoinette, philosophers like Edmund Burke, and geographical locations (Russia, Germany, and all their political associations of revolution and war). And well Yeats might have kept real-life reference points since his poem was a reaction to the years 1918/19, thick with personal and collective upheaval: World War I, followed hot on the heels by the Spanish flue that nearly took the poet’s wife and unborn child, the Russian Revolution which Yeats eyed suspiciously, the beginning of the Irish war of independence from the British Empire that started in January 1919 which evoked both admiration and ambivalence in Yeats, and which prompted ‘The Second Coming’, published one and a half years after its inception in the literary magazine The Dial.
Eliminating historical references allows the poem to matter universally. It’s also part and parcel of Yeats’s philosophy of myth and dreams: he believed there was a kind of ‘Spiritus Mundi’, or world spirit, a collective consciousness carrying our myths in symbolic form into which poets needed to tap to make their work understandable to all of humanity. Academic David Dwan calls Yeats’s allusive images ‘productive vagueness’. Not so much about clarity than about tone, mood, and feeling.
In 1900, Yeats reflected on Percy Shelley, a poet who flourished a hundred years before him, and who constructed his own particular mythology-fuelled word-view: a ‘too conscious arrangement’ in poetry, Yeats writes, suffers from ‘barrenness and shallowness…The poet of essences and pure ideas must seek in the half-lights that glimmer from symbol to symbol as if to the ends of the earth’. So, if you (like me) don’t get the poem, you’re doing exactly what Yeats wanted you to do.
¶
In my research on the poem, I realised I wasn’t the only person to think that the piece was an apt address to these our dreadful times. In fact, turning to ‘The Second Coming’ at precisely such times had started to become rather trite at least half a century ago when writers like Joan Didion and Chinua Achebe carved it up for catchy lines for book titles. The more journalists and politicians quote Yeats, the more we’re in trouble.
Perhaps it’s commonplace to turn to ‘The Second Coming’, but I ask: what’s wrong with commonplace? If it’s meant something to previous generations, it’s going to mean something to us. Does the poem console? I don’t think so. Does it frighten? I don’t think so either. I think it offers a way to turn towards what is happening around us, rather than away from it. A way to look and acknowledge. A way of attending.
When Yeats died, one of his great successors, W.H. Auden, wrote a eulogy with the damning line ‘poetry makes nothing happen’. Yeats seemed to think so himself, when responding to friend and sometime lover Ethil Mannin who tried to get his support for a German activist in a nazi prison in the early 1930s: ‘If you have my poems by you,’ he replies to her, ‘look up a poem called ‘The Second Coming’ […] It was written some sixteen or seventeen years ago & foretold what is happening. I have written of the same thing again & again since. This will seem little to you with your strong practical sense, for it takes fifty years for a poet’s weapon to influence the issue.’
It is true that poetry makes nothing happen. One wonders whether it even has to. That’s not really where its responsibilities and effects lie.
This newsletter makes nothing happen. Children in Gaza are still slaughtered every day. And yet we’re told we’re not allowed to say stop. When did it become a crime to call for peace? Things have fallen apart for a very long time. The veil has come off now.
How to confront that? I don’t know. Perhaps by turning towards, not away from. Perhaps by worrying about detail like semicolons and hyphens (on which I’ll reflect next week). Detail matters. Punctuation matters. It keeps the centre together. If only long enough for us to see and grasp a deep truth. Out of Spiritus Mundi.