W. B. Yeats poem

Thinking Activity on W. B. Yeats poem

Hello reader this blog is related to Two poems 'The Second Coming', 'On Being Asked For War Poem' i am trying to read The Second Coming as a pandemic poem and in both poem apply concept of Indian Poetics. 

Who is W. B.Yeats

William Butler Yeats is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He belonged to the Protestant, Anglo-Irish minority that had controlled the economic, political, social, and cultural life of Ireland since at least the end of the 17th century. Most members of this minority considered themselves English people who happened to have been born in Ireland, but Yeats staunchly affirmed his Irish nationality. Although he lived in London for 14 years of his childhood (and kept a permanent home there during the first half of his adult life), Yeats maintained his cultural roots, featuring Irish legends and heroes in many of his poems and plays. He was equally firm in adhering to his self-image as an artist. 

This conviction led many to accuse him of elitism, but it also unquestionably contributed to his greatness. As fellow poet W.H. Auden noted in a 1948 Kenyon Review essay entitled “Yeats as an Example,” Yeats accepted the modern necessity of having to make a lonely and deliberate “choice of the principles and presuppositions in terms of which [made] sense of his experience.” Auden assigned Yeats the high praise of having written “some of the most beautiful poetry” of modern times. Perhaps no other poet stood to represent a people and country as poignantly as Yeats, both during and after his life, and his poetry is widely read today across the English-speaking world.

The Second Coming 

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

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?

When Yeats wrote ‘The Second Coming’ the First World War had just ended, memories of the Easter Rising in Ireland were still vivid and revolution had broken out in Russia. The world appeared to be in a state of flux and chaos.

The ‘Second Coming’ refers to the idea that Jesus will return to Earth towards the end of time to bring justice and order. However, Yeats does not express a Christian interpretation of these final days. He believed in a complex set of ideas to do with ‘gyres’, intersecting cone‑shaped spirals representing various elemental historical and individual forces offering transitions into new worlds. The opening eight lines of the poem offer a complex vision of an apocalypse.

In the second section Yeats presents a disturbing image of a sphinx ‘out of Spiritus Mundi’, which, literally, means ‘spirit of the world’ but here refers to Yeats’s belief that every mind is linked to a single vast intelligence. This glimpse of the new order after two thousand years of Christianity is not a comforting one; Yeats concludes by wondering about the nature of this ‘rough beast’ that ‘Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born’.

In this poem I am going to try read this poem as a pandemic poem. 

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.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer”. The first line Turning and Turning like waves of pandemic if we connect with today corona situation The falcon cannot hear the falconer -rumor of wuhan create virus and then spread whole china and all over World. 

His wife caught the virus and was very close to death. The highest death rates of the 1918–19 pandemic were among pregnant women—in some areas, it was an up to 70 percent death rate for these women.So here we found this poem as pandemic.It was a very terrible situation as we are facing today because of CORONA pandemic

When you read it through the lens of the pandemic, this other poem begins to emerge. You could see the way such a poem could resonate with people who’ve experienced this pandemic. This atmosphere—things are falling apart; the center cannot hold—an atmosphere of “mere anarchy, loosed upon the world.”

Then specific imagery like the “blood-dimmed tide”—when one of the most frequent effects of this flu was bleeding from the nose, mouth, and ears. Just floods of blood. And then, the way people drowned in their beds, from their lungs filling up with fluid … and he has a line about the “ceremony of innocence being drowned,” when it’s his wife and unborn baby who were in the process of drowning like that.

Critical analysis poem by W. B. Yeats 

‘Death’ is not perhaps numbered among the most famous poems by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), but it is probably the shortest of all his finest poems. In just a dozen lines, Yeats examines human attitudes to death, contrasting them with an animal’s ignorance of its own mortality. ‘Death’ was written in 1929 and included in Yeats’s 1933 volume The Winding Stair and Other Poems. Here is ‘Death’, followed by a few words by way of analysis.

Nor dread nor hope attend

A dying animal;

A man awaits his end

Dreading and hoping all;

Many times he died,

Many times rose again,

A great man in his pride

Confronting murderous men

Casts derision upon

Supersession of breath;

He knows death to the bone –

Man has created death.

We afraid to over death or we can say we travel over whole life to die. We afford to live long life on the other hand animal are not afraid to die we kill  number of small insect everyday. We can say that हम जनम ही मरने के लिए लेते हैं.

In summary, Yeats compares man’s awareness that he will die with an animal’s lack of awareness of this: an animal neither fears death (because it has no concept of dying) nor hopes for life after death (as man does, consoling himself through religion that death will not be the end). When Yeats writesMany times he died,

Many times rose again

He is probably echoing a sentiment put forward by Shakespeare in Julius Caesar: ‘Cowards die many times before W B Yeats their deaths. The brave experience death only once.’ We ‘die’ in the course of our lives many times, through failure of nerve or failing to live in some other sense; yet we get another chance to make our lives good; this reading of the lines is borne out by the next line, referring as it does to ‘A great man in his pride’.Indeed, a ‘great man’, one who has to deal with, and confront, men who commit murder, has learnt to ridicule man’s fixation upon death, which is described as mere ‘Supersession of breath’. ‘Supersession’ is an intriguing word here. It means ‘cessation’ or ‘discontinuance’, but this sense of the word is marked as ‘rare’ by the Oxford English Dictionary; the more usual meaning is ‘replacement’ (‘supersession’ being the complementary noun for the verb ‘supersede’, meaning to replace something). The poem, then, suggests an ambivalence: when we breathe our last breath on this earth, do we merely replace one kind of existence with another? What happens to us when we die?

Not that these questions trouble the ‘great man’ Yeats mentions: he ‘knows death to the bone’ and knows that ‘Man has created death’ – that is, death is a man-made concept. Of course, Yeats is not denying that men die; what he is rejecting here is the notion that death or mortality is something we should dwell too much upon. An animal dies, just like a man; but an animal does not live its life governed by questions of what happens when it shuffles off this mortal coil, or what might await it after it’s breathed its last on this earth.

The ‘great man’ Yeats refers to in ‘Death’ is Kevin O’Higgins, an Irish politician who had been assassinated in 1927 (O’Higgins has overseen the execution of several IRA men, which had made him very unpopular among the IRA). But Yeats’s poem is not, of course, rigidly wedded to its political context, and makes a general point about man’s attitude to his own mortality. How can we forget that one day we will die?

In my view animal not have language we don't know I think they speak about death or survive idea fear we go to near them they attack back.