The Second Coming’ is one of W. B. Yeats’s most well-known poems. It was written amid the Irish War of Independence, in the aftermath of the Great War and the Spanish flu pandemic. The speaker senses that the world – that is, the present order of things – is coming apart at the seams. The reference to Bethlehem at the end does not look back to Christmas, but anticipates an antichristmas with dread. It reads as follows:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
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;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
It is often read as an expression of Europe’s loss of hope in the Christian gospel following the Great War. The image of the drowning of the ceremony of innocence – that is, baptism – inverts the rite of Christian initiation. It is an anti-baptism, the deconversion of Christendom. And, for the speaker of the poem, it is the harbinger of a terrible vision from out of the Spirit of the World. In Yeats’s personal theory of poetry, the Spiritus Mundi refers to a common memory, not unlike Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, from which the archetypes and analogies known to virtually every human society. For Yeats it is the source of inspiration, the well-spring from which true artists drink. It can also refer, as it usually does in the scriptures, to the spirit that opposes the Spirit of Christ, ‘the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience’, ‘according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air’ (Ephesians 2:2). Out of this spirit – however conceptualized – arises a vision of a manticore. A creature drawn from Persian mythology – having the head of a man, the body of a lion, and the tail of a dragon – the manticore was sometimes used in medieval art to depict the devil, recalling I Peter 5:8, ‘your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour’. Yeats’s vision resembles Revelation 11:7, ‘when the two witnesses [the law and the prophets? the prophets and apostles?] shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them’. The poem places us in the realm of the apocalyptic.
What can all of this have to do with Advent? This first season of the Christian year looks both backwards and forwards. Looking backwards, it has in view the prophecies of the coming Christ, the ministry of the forerunner, the Baptist, anticipating the Lord’s incarnation. Looking ahead, it eagerly anticipates his second coming, in glory and power to judge both the quick and the dead. When St. Paul tells the Thessalonians about that coming day, he warns,
Let no man deceive you by any means, for that Day shall not come, unless there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition, who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God or that is worshiped, so that he sitteth as God in the temple of God, showing himself to be God.
This is the one of whom St John also warned, ‘ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time’. As so often with apocalyptic visions, it is not just a glimpse into the future, but a peak behind the curtain to see the truth about the conflict in which we are presently embroiled. Yeats, brilliantly, imagines the antichrist as coming to be born in Bethlehem – this beast is the inversion of all that our Lord is, the epitome of the false Christs and false prophets of whom the Lord Jesus waned that they ‘shall shew signs and wonders, to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect’ (Mark 13:22).
The poem describes the darkness before the dawn, or the crisis – both present and final – that calls for divine intervention. Yeats assumes the role of John Baptist, vehemently condemning a world gone wrong and the wrongdoing that made it so. And, that is the theme of the season of Advent. Like the Gospels, the Christian year begins with that voice in the wilderness, warning of the Day of Wrath to come, crying ‘Repent!’ This dreadful warning is the herald of the Son of God – just as the Christian life begins with repentance and baptism, the death that brings life. The Prayer Book’s Advent Collect provides precisely the right response to Yeates’s vision of the rough beast that slouches towards Bethlehem to be born – ‘Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light’.
Dr D. N. Keane is the Managing Editor of The Anglican Way and teaches English at Georgia Southern University. More of his work can be read at drewkeane.com.