W. B. Yeats' Poems

 Thinking Activity: W. B. Yeats' Poems

This blog is a response to the thinking activity assigned by Dr Dilip Barad Sir. In this blog, I am going to find the pandemic element and background in Yeats' poem "The Second Coming"

Pandemic Reading of "The Second Coming"

The Second Coming is one of Yeats’ famous poems, written in 1919 soon after the end of World War I. As the title suggests, it describes the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Yeats is giving the mysterious and powerful alternative of the Christian idea of the second coming like Jesus’s prophesied to return to the earth as a saviour 

What is the Second Coming?

The Second Coming was the religious teaching of the Catholic Church which stated that Christ would return to the Earth for the final judgment. During the Middle Ages, the idea of the second coming was of great importance to people and was widely discussed, from the Church to the people.

The Title:

This poem is very complex to understand and is debatable. At first, the critics criticize the title of the poem. According to them, the title is against Christian belief. Athletic remarked that the title of Yeats’ poem is not even a misnomer but a misleading device for conferring upon the poem a range of reference and imaginative power that it does not possess and cannot sustain. The poem should have been called“The Second Birth” which is the wording Yeats first employs in its draft. According to the critic, by giving the title of“The Second Coming”. Instead of the second birth, Yeats disgraces the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

 

Pandemic Reading:

Nowadays the pandemic reading is very easy as we are going through the Covid-19 Pandemic. Before our times no one has ever thought about the possibility of reading this poem through the pandemic lens. Many have always seen it through religious or anti-religious poems. Many writers have talked about the war aspect of the modern era, but we find very few works that include the impact that pandemic has made on the respective era.

We can find some works like Elizabeth Outka’s “Viral Modernism: The influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature”. The book looks at the small group of authors who addressed the pandemic head-on in their work but also argues the works of some of the great writers like T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf. W. B. Yeats was deeply affected by the pandemic. By combining literary analysis with the flu history Outka is making clear that the pandemic wasn’t Forgotten it just went underground.

Why diseases are recorded differently than War in Our Mind:

Diseases are recorded differently by our mind than something like war. Both the situations are different but a massive amount of death is certain in both. Diseases are highly individual, where you are fighting your own battle. War is Different from pandemic by nature because nations fight each other. War is something that nations and politics give importance to and respect the deaths of the soldiers. Whereas in Contagious diseases people must maintain their distance, it creates a different fear among people. To record the massive impact of the pandemic is a very difficult process, you can record the economic loss, to keep the records of the dead bodies which is something beyond tangible in times like pandemic, is too difficult. 

The Second Coming Poem and the Pandemic:

The Second Coming was published in the year 1919, if we investigate the history of pandemics, we can find The Spanish Flu or the Great Influenza epidemic had struck in the year 1918 and two years later, nearly a third of the global population, estimated 500 million people was affected. Estimates of deaths range from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it the second deadliest pandemic in human history.

Elizabeth Outka Writes, “In November 1918, at the height of the pandemic’s deadly second wave, W. B. Yeats watched helplessly as his pregnant wife, George, struggled to fight off the virus at their rented house in Dublin.” (Outka) In this pandemic unlike so many pregnant women of the time, George Survived coming on the verge of death. Further, as Outka writes, “Just a few weeks later, during his wife’s recovery, Yeats wrote arguably his most famous poem, “The Second Coming,” one widely read as channelling the zeitgeist of its turbulent moment." (Outka)

Where can we find such a thing in the 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.” (1-8)

Turning and turning can be seen as the symptoms of a disease, things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, can be read as the body is going through intense pain and dizziness it might because of that reasons 'Centre' (mind) not control the body. ‘The blood-dimmed tide’ could be related to influenza and ‘The ceremony of Innocence is drowned’ could be related to the death of the newborn/yet to born baby or mother by the flu.

Work Cited:

Outka, Elizabeth. Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. , 2020. Internet resource.

Yeats, W.B,. "The Second Coming By William Butler Yeats | Poetry Foundation". Poetry Foundation, 2022, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming.