Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

The Second Coming

(1920)

William Butler Yeats

(June 13, 1865 – January 28, 1939)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

"The Second Coming" Notes

1  gyre:

• gyre (noun) (Oxford Dictionaries) 
  1  A spiral or vortex.
  1.1 Geography A circular pattern of currents in an ocean basin:
  the central North Pacific gyre
  Origin
  Late Middle English (in the sense 'whirl someone or something round'): from late Latin gyrare, from Latin gyrus 'a ring', from Greek guros. The noun is from Latin gyrus.
• 
  

• Matthew 24
• Mark 13

• Spiritus mundi (Rhodes, Chloe. A Certain Je Ne Sais Quoi: Words We Pinched from Other Languages. 2009. London: Michael O'Mara Books, 2011.)
  soul, spirit of the world (Latin)
  The concept of 'spiritus mundi' has its roots in the philosophy of Plato, but the phrase itself was coined by fifteenth-century German astrologer and occult philosopher Agrippa von Nettesheim. He used it as a label for the spirit element that he believed permeated the whole world, and was the force behind alchemy and occult occurences. The psychologist Carl Jung elaborated on these ideas when he discussed the idea of a collective subconscious and the term is still used by astrologers and spiritualists today.

Gyre

Robartes copied out and gave to Aherne several mathematical diagrams from the Speculum, squares and spheres, cones made up of revolving gyres intersecting each other at various angles, figures sometimes with great complexity. His explanation of these, obtained invariably from the followers of Kusta-ben-Luki, is founded upon a single fundamental thought. The mind, whether expressed in history or in the individual life, has a precise movement, which can be quickened or slackened but cannot be fundamentally altered, and this movement can be expressed by a mathematical form. [...] To the Judwalis, as interpreted by Michael Robartes, all living minds have likewise a fundamental mathematical movement, however adapted in plant, or animal, or man to particular circumstance; and when you have found this movement and calculated its relations, you can foretell the entire future of that mind. A supreme religious act of their faith is to fix the attention on the mathematical form of this movement until the whole past and future of humanity, or of an individual man, shall be present to the intellect as if it were accomplished in a single moment. [...] The figure while the soul is in the body, or suffering from the consequences of that life, is usually drawn as a double cone, the narrow end of each cone being in the centre of the broad end of the other. [...] The objective man on the other hand, whose gyre moves outward, receives at this moment the revelation, not of himself seen from within, for that is impossible to objective man, but of himself as if he were somebody else. This figure is true also of history, for the end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction. At the present moment the life gyre is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ which was narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest expansion.

W. B. Yeats

[poetic rhythm is] to prolong that moment of contemplation, when we are neither awake nor asleep

Metrical composition is always very difficult to me, nothing is done upon the first day, not a rhyme is in its place; and when at last the rhymes begin to come, the first rough draft of a six-line stanza takes the whole day.

From Autobiographies. 1955. 202.

You do not work at your technique. You take the easiest course—leave out the rhymes or choose the most hackneyed rhymes, because—damn you—you are lazy...When your technique is sloppy your matter grows second-hand; there is no difficulty to force you down under the surface. Difficulty is our plough.

—Letter to Margo Collis, early April 1936.

Vendler on Yeats's Form

"Whatever I do," Yeats cried out in a 1926 letter, "poetry will remain a torture" (#4952). (1) [...]

"I always try for the most natural order possible, largely to make thought which being poetical always is difficult to modern people as plain as I can" (#1263). [...]

There has been no volume in which students can find descriptions of the inner and outer formal choices Yeats made, the cultural significance his forms bore for him, or the way his forms—in all their astounding variety—became the material body of his thoughts and emotions. (xv)

—Vendler, Helen. Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. Cambridge: Belknap, 2007.

Sample Student Responses to W. B. Yeats's "The Second Coming" 

Response 1:

Study Question:

Reference and Further Reading

Vendler, Helen. Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form. Cambridge: Belknap, 2007. Print.

    [CL 821.8 V452O]

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Last updated March 19, 2015