William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest of all Irish poets. We haven’t tried to offer any easy answers here, but merely drawn attention to some details of the poem which are of interest. Partly this is what makes it so compelling: it is a poem that asks questions, rather than providing answers. It’s elusive and ambiguous, defying any straightforward analysis. ‘The Second Coming’ is another such poem.
Many of Yeats’s most celebrated poems end with a question: ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ (‘ Among School Children’) ‘Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?’ (‘ Leda and the Swan’). The poem also carries echoes of Shelley’s enigmatic poem ‘Ozymandias’, which we’ve analysed here. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ fuses images and themes involving apocalypse, the desert, religion, and the fall of civilisations. Indeed, like another great modernist poem about the fallout of the First World War, T. The word order in that final line, with the verb ‘Reel’ being placed before the noun, summons up the spectre of a homophone, ‘Real’ – but shadows are not real, so this is an illusion, a desert mirage. Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it And then we have the wordplay:Ī shape with lion body and the head of a man, These are worth analysing and pondering on in more detail.
Indeed, although the poem is unrhymed, like many poems written around this time – such as poems of the First World War by Wilfred Owen and others – it utilises other techniques that stand in for traditional rhyme: pararhyme ( hold/world, man/sun), repetition ( at hand/at hand), and what we might call semantic rhyme ( sleep/cradle).
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