Next year will be the centenary of one of the most famous poems of the 20th century, W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” I presume there’ll be suitable acknowledgment of this in literary circles, and even an occasional nod from those of us who labor in less rarefied intellectual climes. But if poetry has the ability to bring home to us certain truths with a focus and immediacy that mere prose has difficulty replicating, and if these truths are important, why wait for 2019? After all, by next year some academic somewhere will have launched an attack on “centennialism” or “decimalism” (some professor probably already has), explaining that it’s intersectionally illegitimate to privilege multiples of 10. So why not jump the gun and call to mind now, 99 years later, his great poem?
Here’s the first stanza:
This remains an extraordinarily evocative foreshadowing of what was to transpire in the quarter-century after Yeats wrote. But after that, for the following seven decades or so, the center was more or less put back together. For all of the trials and tribulations of the Cold War and the ’60s and 9/11, the center once again held.
Does it still? One can’t help but feel that we are slipping back into a widening gyre. One can blame the intemperate falcons or the out-of-touch falconers. But apportioning blame is at this point less important than recognizing reality. Abroad, the horrors of Syria in particular—but not only Syria—do resemble a blood-dimmed tide about which no authority in the civilized world has done or proposes to do anything. At home, it has become clear that passionate intensity tends to correlate inversely with good sense and good character.
So Yeats’s first stanza describes our situation. But his second suggests a different outcome from what we glimpse on the horizon. There seems, for better or worse, to be no Second Coming at hand. If some beast were slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, one could at least analyze it and try to figure out how to combat it. But all we seem to have ahead of us is an ever-widening gyre, with birds of prey circling undisturbed and unconstrained, pouncing as they wish and as they are increasingly able.
Yeats died in January 1939, just before the “blood-dimmed tide” was truly loosed upon the world. Another formidable poet, W. H. Auden, commemorated him in verse weeks later. Auden had hopes that Yeats’s “unconstraining voice” could “still persuade us to rejoice,” thus his invocation:
But Auden was under no illusions in the spring of 1939. He saw with clarity the world around him and what was soon to come:
Yeats and Auden were, I suppose, pessimistic that political and social action could avert a coming nightmare or could repair the broken bonds of society. Who am I to quarrel with them? But I would point out that we are not yet in 1939. Nor are the horrors of our time remotely comparable to those of 1914-1918.
The poets capture our plight with unparalleled poignancy. But we who live in the prosaic world of politics and deeds can do more than lament. William Gladstone, a figure from an earlier and more confident generation, put it well: “The resources of civilization against its enemies are not yet exhausted.”
But this means appreciating that there are enemies that must be confronted. And it means understanding there is such a thing as civilization that is worth defending.
