Analysis of Literary Devices in “The Second Coming”

 literary devices are tools the writers use to convey emotions, ideas, and beliefs. With the help of these devices, they make their texts appealing to the reader. Yeats has also employed some literary devices in this poem to prophesize the future of the world. The analysis of some of the literary devices used in this poem has been stated below.

1. Metaphor: There are several metaphors used in this poem such as, “the Falcon” and “the falconer,” which stands for the world and the controlling force that directs humanity. Similarly, “the blood-dimmed tide” stands for waves of violence, while “the rough beast” stands for “the Second Coming.”
2. Hyperbole: Hyperbole is a device used to exaggerate a statement for the sake of emphasis. The poet has used hyperbole in the tenth line where it is stated as, “Surely the Second Coming is at hand,” as if the beast is about to enter the world in just a few hours or days.
3. Consonance: Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line such as the sound of /r/ in “Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.”
4. Allusion: Allusion is an indirect reference to a person, place, thing or idea of a historical, cultural political or literary significance in a literary piece. The use of illusion in the fourth line of the second stanza is “the spiritus” It is an illusion to the Latin phrase meaning the world’s soul. “The Second Coming” is also a biblical allusion to the return of Christ.
5. Alliteration: Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds in the same line such as the sound of /s/ in “Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the” and /n/ sound in “The darkness drops again; but now I know.”
6. Symbolism: Symbolism is using symbols to signify ideas and qualities, giving them symbolic meanings that are different from the literal meanings. Yeats has used multiple symbols such as, “falcon” as the symbol of the world, “desert birds” are the symbols of approaching death and “the Second Coming” symbolizes the indifference.
7. Assonance: Assonance is the repetition of same vowel sounds in the same line such as the sound of /i/ in “Turning and turning in the widening gyre” and /e/ sound in “The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
8. Imagery: Imagery means the use of images of the five senses intended to make the readers understand the writer’s feelings and emotions. Yeats has used imagery to present the vivid and clear picture of the ominous beast such as, “A shape with lion body and the head of a man”, “somewhere in sands of the desert” and “Is moving its slow thighs.”

The literary analysis shows that Yeats has skillfully used some literary devices to discuss the reason why the world is going astray. The effective use of these devices and clarity of subject matter have made the poem thoughtful for the readers.

Reference: https://literarydevices.net/the-second-coming/

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Themes of "The Second Coming" by WB Yeats

 Civilisation, Chaos and Control

“The Second Coming” presents a nightmarish apocalyptic scenario, as the speaker describes human beings’ increasing loss of control and tendency towards violence and anarchy. Surreal images fly at the reader thick and fast, creating an unsettling atmosphere that suggests a world on the brink of destruction.

Yet for all its metaphorical complexity, “The Second Coming” actually has a relatively simple message: it basically predicts that time is up for humanity, and that civilization as we know it is about to be undone. Yeats wrote this poem right after World War I, a global catastrophe that killed millions of people. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that the poem paints a bleak picture of humanity, suggesting that civilization’s sense of progress and order is only an illusion.

With the above in mind, the first stanza’s challenging imagery starts to make more sense. The “falconer,” representing humanity’s attempt to control its world, has lost its “falcon” in the turning “gyre” (the gyre is an image Yeats uses to symbolize grand, sweeping historical movements as a kind of spiral). These first lines could also suggest how the modern world has distanced people from nature (represented here by the falcon). In any case, it’s clear that whatever connection once linked the metaphorical falcon and falconer has broken, and now the human world is spiraling into chaos.

Indeed, the poem suggests that though humanity might have looked like it was making progress over the past “twenty centuries”—via seemingly ever-increasing knowledge and scientific developments, for example—the First World War proved people to be as capable of self-destruction as ever. “Anarchy” was “loosed upon the world,” along with tides of blood (which clearly evoke the mass death of war). “Innocence” was just a “ceremony,” now “drowned.” The “best” people lack “conviction,” which suggests they're not bothering to do anything about this nightmarish reality, while the “worst” people seem excited and eager for destruction. The current state of the world, according to the speaker, proves that the "centre"—that is, the foundation of society—was never very strong.

In other words, humanity’s supposed arc of progress has been an illusion. Whether the poem means that humanity has lost its way or never knew it to begin with is unclear, but either way the promises of modern society—of safety, security, and human dignity—have proven empty. And in their place, a horrific creature has emerged—a grotesque perversion of the “Second Coming” promised by Christianity, during which Jesus Christ is supposed to return to the earth and invite true believers to heaven. This Second Coming is clearly not Jesus, but instead a “rough beast” that humanity itself has woken up (perhaps, the first stanza implies, by the incessant noise of its many wars).

With this final image of the beast, the poem indicates that while humanity seemed to get more civilized in the 2,000 years that followed Christ's birth, in reality people have been sowing the seeds of their own destruction all along. This “rough beast” is now “pitilessly” slouching toward the birthplace of Jesus—likely in order to usher in a new age of “darkness” and “nightmare.”

Morality and Christianity

“The Second Coming” offers an unsettling take on Christian morality, suggesting that it is not the stable and reliable force that people believe it to be. The poem clearly alludes to the biblical Book of Revelation from the start, in which, put simply, Jesus returns to Earth to save the worthy. According to the Bible, this is meant to happen when humanity reaches the end times: an era of complete war, famine, destruction and hatred. The poem suggests that the end times are already happening, because humanity has lost all sense of morality—and perhaps that this morality was only an illusion to begin with.

In the first stanza, the speaker describes the chaos, confusion, and moral weakness that have caused “things” to “fall apart.” In the second, the poem makes it clear that it’s a specifically Christian morality that is being undone. In describing this wide-ranging destruction, the poem asks whether Christian morality was built on weak foundations in the first place—that is, perhaps humanity was never really moral, but just pretended to be.

The first stanza's imagery develops this sense of morality being turned upside down: good and evil (the "best" and "worst") are no longer the reliable categories that they once were, replaced by “mere anarchy” (“mere” means something like “pure” here). Humanity has drenched itself in blood—the “blood-dimmed tide”—suggesting that morality was only ever a “ceremony,” a performance that conjured the illusion that humankind was "innocent."

What's more, the poem suggests that no one—not even Jesus—can remedy this bleak reality. The biblical Book of Revelation predicts a kind of final reckoning in which people essentially get what they deserve based on their moral behavior and religious virtues; it indicates that Jesus will come to save those who are worthy of being saved. But “The Second Coming” offers no such comfort.

Instead, in the first line of the second stanza the poem hints that a moment of divine intervention must be at hand after the chaos of the first stanza ("surely some revelation is at hand"). And, as it turns out, "some revelation" is at hand. But rather than returning the world to peace, this new revelation makes things worse: a new and grotesque beast heads toward Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, to be brought into the world. If Jesus was the figurehead for a moral movement, this new beastly leader is the figurehead of a new world of “anarchy,” in which the “best” people (likely the most moral people) lack the courage of their convictions and the “worst” are allowed to thrive. In other words, the poem portrays Christian morality and prophecy as weak, or even proven false, in the face of the violence and destruction that humans have created.

The “blank gaze” of this new creature provides further evidence of just how hopeless the situation is. This being might have the head of a “man,” but it doesn’t have moral sense—instead, it is “pitiless.” It is arriving to preside over “blood-dimmed tide[s]” and “drowned’ “innocence”—not a world of kindness, charity, and justice. Its sphinx-like appearance is also deliberately at odds with Christian imagery, which further suggests a break with Christian morality. Meanwhile, the “Spiritus Mundi” mentioned by the poem is what Yeats thought of as the world’s collective unconscious, from which the poet could draw insight. This vision of the beast, then, is suggestive of a worldwide shift into “anarchy,” as the collective mind of humanity lets go of morality.

“The Second Coming” is a deeply ambiguous poem. Indeed, Yeats revised specific cultural references out of the poem before its publication. But there’s no mistaking that this is a bleak vision of the future of humankind, one which presents morality as a kind of collective dream that is now turning into a nightmare.

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Characteristics and factors of Modernism in Literature

 

Modernist writers proclaimed a new "subject matter" for literature and they felt that their new way of looking at life required a new form, a new way of writing. Writers of this period tend to pursue more experimental and usually more highly individualistic forms of writing. The sense of a changing world was stimulated by radical new developments, such as:

      new insights from the emerging fields of psychology and sociology

      anthropological studies of comparative religion

      new theories of electromagnetism and quantum physics

      a growing critique of British imperialism and the ideology of empire

      the growing force of doctrines of racial superiority in Germany

      the escalation of warfare to a global level

      shifting power structures, particularly as women enter the work force

      the emergence of a new "city consciousness"

      new information technologies such as radio and cinema

      the advent of mass democracy and the rise of mass communication

      fin-de-siècle ["end-of-the-century"] consciousness

 

Some other characteristics of Modern Poetry:

      Development of science and technology

      Rapid industrialization and urbanization

      Expression in trade, commerce and economic activities

      Lack of faith on religion and critical outlook towards life

      Spread of education and literature

      Rise and growth of middle-class

      Women empowerment

      Acute frustration and pessimism

      Experimental tendency in art and literature

      Dominance of various ‘isms’ like imagism, Dadaism, symbolism, realism etc.

      Complexity and obscurity in thought and expression

      Rejection of orthodoxy

      Psychological approach

      Over materialism and lack of spiritualism

Factors behind Modernism:

Notwithstanding it is usually said to have begun with the French Symbolist movement and it artificially ends with the Second World War, the beginning and ending of the modernist period are of course arbitrary. Poets like W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) started in a post-Romantic, Symbolist vein and modernized their poetic idiom after being affected by political and literary developments. Imagism proved radical and important, marking a new point of departure for poetry. Some consider 'it began in the works of Hardy and Pound, Eliot and Yeats, Williams and Stevens.[4] English language poets, like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Basil Bunting ('a born modernist'), Wallace Stevens and E.E. Cummings also went on to produce work after World War II.

The major three factors behind the modernism are given below-

      World War I (1914-1918): 

The outbreak of World War I represented a setback for the budding modernist movement for a number of reasons: firstly, writers like Aldington found themselves in active service; secondly, paper shortages and related factors meant that publication of new work became increasingly difficult; and, thirdly, public sentiment in time of war meant that war poets such as Wilfred Owen, who wrote more conventional verse, became increasingly popular. One poet who served in the war, the visual artist David Jones, later resisted this trend in his long experimental war poem "In Parenthesis", which was written directly out of his trench experiences but was not published until 1937. The war also tended to undermine the optimism of the Imagists. This was reflected in a number of major poems written in its aftermath. Pound's "Homage to Sextus Propertius" (1919) uses the loose translations and transformations of the Latin poet Propertius to ridicule war propaganda and the idea of empire. His "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (1921) represents his farewell to Imagism and lyric poetry in general. The writing of these poems coincided with Pound's decision to abandon London permanently. Sound poetry emerged in this period as a response to the war. For many Dadaists, including German writer Hugo Ball and New York poet and performer Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, sound poems were protestations against the sounds of war. As Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo write, “Born as the trench warfare intensified, phonetic poetry was the language of trauma, a new language to counter the noise of the cannons”. The Baroness’s poem “Klink-Hratzvenga (Death-wail)”, written in response to her husband’s suicide after the war’s end, was “a mourning song in nonsense sounds that transcended national boundaries”. Working from a confrontational feminist and artistic agenda, the Baroness asserted a distinctly female subjectivity in the post-WWI era. The most famous English-language modernist work arising out of this post-war disillusionment is T. S. Eliot's epic "The Waste Land" (1922)

 

      Russian Revolution / Communist Revolution (1919-1920): 

The Russian Revolution took place in 1917, during the final phase of World War I. It removed Russia from the war and brought about the transformation of the Russian Empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), replacing Russia’s traditional monarchy with the world’s first Communist state. The revolution happened in stages through two separate coups, one in February and one in October. The new government, led by Vladimir Lenin, would solidify its power only after three years of civil war, which ended in 1920. Although the events of the Russian Revolution happened abruptly, the causes may be traced back nearly a century.

      Great Depression / Financial Crisis (1930): 

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place during the 1930s. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations; however, in most countries it started in 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s. It was the longest, deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. In the 21st century, the Great Depression is commonly used as an example of how far the world's economy can decline. The Great Depression has been the subject of much writing, as authors have sought to evaluate an era that caused financial as well as emotional trauma. Perhaps the most noteworthy and famous novel written on the subject is The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded both the Nobel Prize for literature and the Pulitzer Prize for the work. The novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers who are forced from their home as drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agricultural industry occur during the Great Depression. Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is another important novella about a journey during the Great Depression. Additionally, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is set during the Great Depression. Margaret Atwood's Booker prize-winning The Blind Assassin is likewise set in the Great Depression, centering on a privileged socialite's love affair with a Marxist revolutionary. The era spurred the resurgence of social realism, practiced by many who started their writing careers on relief programs, especially the Federal Writers' Project in the U.S.

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Historic Dimensions of Modernism especially in literature

 

Modernism begins in the late 1800s or early 1900s, climaxing in the 1910s-30s as writers and artists throughout Europe, the USA, and beyond create and publish an enormous number of revolutionary works that are still recognized as titanic and influential, even if, a century later, their application as models grows more limited.

The great decades of Modernism parallel profound world events, particularly the two World Wars (1914-18 & 1939-45) and the Great Depression (1929-1940?).

World War 1 is often seen as a starting event of Modernism. The devastation and disillusion of Western Civilization in the Great War certainly accelerated and deepened Modernist thinking. However, harbingers of Modernism may be seen in late fiction of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, or Impressionist paintings by Manet or Monet. Political revolutions, upheavals, reforms, or sea-changes are contemporary with cultural Modernism: Russian Revolution (1917), Nazism & Fascism (1930s), USA New Deal (1930s), Chinese Revolution (1946-52).

Modernism may or may not end at mid-20th century, depending on definitions of postmodernism, but certainly the heroic age of Modernism has passed; the current cultural era may be, like Realism following Romanticism, both an extension of and exhaustion from a revolutionary period.

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