On Fri, 23 Jul 2010, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Ok, I just ordered a copy for $0.55 from Amazon. Doesn't anyone else on
> this list have a copy of this book?
Here you go. The text is attached below. Please forgive the errors of my very cheap printer, pressed into service as an OCR scanner.
Michael
==============
[From _Yeats_ by Harold Bloom (Oxford Univ. Press), pp. 317-324]
<begin Bloom excerpt>
*The Second Coming*
Increasingly this is seen as Yeats's central poem, and not only by exegetes, but by whatever general literary public we still have. The Johnsonian respect for the common reader must enter into any fresh consideration of *The Second Coming.* Though I will indicate limitations of the poem, my concern here is not with its limitations, but with the nature of its power. My prime subject, as throughout this book, is Yeats's Romanticism, particularly with regard to the austere and terrible melancholy of Poetic Influence within that tradition. As much as any other poem by Yeats, *The Second Coming* bears its direct relation to Blake and Shelley as an overtly defining element in its meaning. The poem quotes Blake and both echoes and parodies the most thematically vital passage in Shelley's most ambitious poem, *Prometheus Unbound*, as a number of critics have remarked.[FN 3]
The manuscripts of *The Second Coming*, as given by Stallworthy, are something of a surprise in relation to the poem's final text.[FN 4] Yeats is writing (according to Ellmann) in January 1919, in the aftermath of war and revolution.[FN 5] His mind is on the Russian Revolution and its menace, particularly to aristocrats, to *antithetical* men. In a way instantly familiar to a student of Blake and Shelley, as Yeats was, the Revolution suggests an apocalypse, and the time of troubles preceding it. But unlike his Romantic precursors, Yeats is on the side of the counter-revolutionaries, and his apocalyptic poem begins by seeing the intervention against revolution as being too late to save the ceremoniously innocent: "The germans are . . . now to Russia come/ Though every day some innocent has died." In his grief for these innocents, Yeats laments the absence of those Blake had satirized as Albion's Angels, the champions of reaction: "And there's no Burke to cry aloud no Pitt." With no one to lead them against revolutionary violence: "The good are wavering," while the worst prevail.[FN 6]
Donald Davie has remarked that the title of Yeats's poem is a misnomer, since Christ's advent was not for Yeats the First Coming.[FN 7] I wish to go further, and suggest that the title is not only a misnomer, but a misleading and illegitimate 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 drafts: "Surely the great falcon must come/ Surely the hour of the second birth is here." Two lines later Yeats first cried out "The second Birth!" and later in revision altered "Birth" to "Coming."[FN 8] As he revised, Yeats evidently thought of associating his vision in the poem both with Christ's prophecy of his Second Coming and with Revelation's account of the Antichrist. I propose the argument that the poem, even as he revised it, does not justify this portentous association. It remains a poem about the second birth of the *antithetical* Divinity or spirit, and a few verbal changes did not alter the poem's conception enough to give a full coherence to its intended irony of reference. Kierkegaard, in the thirteenth thesis of the defense of his *The Concept of Irony* says that irony is like vexation over the fact that others also enjoy what the soul desires for itself. This is worth remembering in judging the irony of *The Second Coming*, and in brooding upon Poetic Influence.
Yeats's poem is a vision not of the Second Coming, but of the Second Birth of the Sphinx, not of Thebes but of Memphis, not the Riddler and Strangler but the one-eyed Divinity of the Sun: "An eye blank and pitiless as the sun," as the draft has it.[FN 9] This is the male Sphinx who had haunted Yeats ever since he had read Shelley's *Ozymandias* in his youth, as distinct from the female Sphinx who had served as a Muse of Destruction for the poets and painters of his Tragic Generation. The Egyptian Sphinx is a kind of demonic parody of one of the Cherubim of Ezekiel's vision, the Cherub taken by Blake as the archetype of his Urizen, whose "stony sleep" in *The Book of Urizen* is used by Yeats in the poem as a description of the dormant state-between-births of his "shape with lion body and the head of a man."[FN 10]
In *The Book of Urizen* that Giant Form falls, unable to bear the battle in heaven he has provoked. To ward off the fiery wrath of his vengeful brother Eternals, he frames a rocky womb for himself:
<quote>
But Urizen laid in a stony sleep Unorganiz'd, rent from Eternity
The Eternals said: What is this? Death Urizen is a clod of clay.[FN 11]
<unquote>
During this stony sleep, Urizen writhes in his rocky womb, going through seven ages of creation until he emerges in a second birth as fallen man, man as he is, as we are. This is man become the Sphinx of Egypt, a demonic parody of what man was, the Living Creatures or Cherubim of Ezekiel's vision.
Yeats's poem then is about the second birth of Urizen or the Egyptian Sphinx, but in a context of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence, the literary context of Shelley's *Prometheus Unbound*, among other Romantic apocalypses. We need not believe that Yeats's use of Shelley here is any more unintentional than his use of Blake. The moral climax of Act I of *Prometheus Unbound* is the speech of the last Fury to the crucified Titan. The Furies have shown Prometheus visions of the failure of the French Revolution, and the failure of Christ's sacrifice. But the last Fury unfolds a worse torment:
<quote>
In each human heart terror survives The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear All that they would disdain to think were true: Hypocrisy and custom make their minds The fanes of many a worship, now outworn. They dare not devise good for man's estate, And yet they know not that they do not dare.
<unquote>
What follows is Shelley's central insight; an insight of the Left that Yeats proceeds to appropriate for the Right:
<quote>
The good want power, but to weep barren tears. The powerful goodness want: worse need for them. The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom; And all best things are thus confused to ill.[FN 12]
The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
<unquote>
Other echoes of Shelley are at work also, before *Ozymandias* and *The Book of Urizen* are recalled. "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" takes us to the tremendous lament for Mutability from *The Witch of Atlas*, when the Witch rejects all natural love:
<quote>
The solid oaks forget their strength, and strew Their latest leaf upon the mountains wide;
The boundless ocean like a drop of dew Will be consumed -- the stubborn center must Be scattered, like a cloud of summer dust.[FN 13]
<unquote>
Because the center cannot hold, natural love cannot endure, and the Witch will not accept the unenduring. Prometheus, the figure of endurance, can scarcely bear the condition that Yeats grimly accepts, the rending apart of power and knowledge, of good and the means of good. Both Shelley and Yeats are noting the weakness of their own camps; Shelley sees the spiritual schizophrenia of his own revolutionary intelligentsia, and Yeats, writing still *before* the rise of Fascism, sees the lack of fervor of the ruling classes. In a dubious afterthought, Yeats later claimed *The Second Coming& as a prophecy of Fascism, but if this was so, then the moral urgency we have assigned to prophecy would have to be reviewed. Conor Cruise O'Brien is the inevitable authority on the politics of Yeats, and he reminds us that "The Freikorps on the Polish-German border were at this time trying to do exactly what the Black and Tans were doing in Ireland and the Freikorps were the direct and proudly acknowledged predecessors of Hitler's Nazis."[FN 14] The Freikorps, I would assume, are the Germans who are "now to Russia come" of Yeats's draft, and clearly this is for Yeats his *antithetical* defence against the *primary* "blood-dimmed tide." The greater terror to come, the apocalyptic shape or Egyptian Sphinx to be reborn, may frighten the poet as he does us, but what I hear in the poem is exultation on the speaker's part as he beholds his vision, and this exultation is not only an intellectual one.[FN 15] But this is where critics must disagree in reading, and discussion needs to be conducted more closely.
Christianity, largely irrelevant to the poem, is dragged into its vortex by Yeats's title, and his change of the Second Birth into the Second Coming. This has resulted in some critical arbitrariness, such as Jeffares's comment on the poem's opening:
<quote>
The falcon represents man, present civilisation, becoming out of touch with Christ, whose birth was the revelation which marked the beginning of the two thousand years of Christianity.[FN 18]
<unquote>
A juxtaposition of this interpretative remark with the two opening lines is not encouraging. All those lines tell us is that the falconer has lost control of his falcon, not because the bird wills disobedience, but because it has spun too far out to hear its master. Powerful as the ensuing lines may be, they are not wholly coherent, in terms of following upon this initial image. It seems likelier that the falconer, rather than the falcon, represents man, and the falcon his mastery of nature, now in the act of falling apart. The center is man; he cannot hold the falcon to an imposed discipline, and the widening gyre is therefore one with the loosing of anarchy upon the world. Anarchy is "mere" because the value-systems that could judge it portentous are being overwhelmed. What seems to me the poem's first real difficulty enters with "the ceremony of innocence." What is it? By the most legitimate rules of interpretation, one looks nearest to hand. If the best lack all conviction, it is because conviction must be ceremonious (in Yeats's view), and the rituals by which conviction is taught to "the best" are not being observed. Yeats is a ritualist in Pater's manner, where the ritual may be the best part of the belief, the only operative technique for fostering conviction. Radical innocence, according to the matched poem, *A Prayer for My Daughter*, is the soul's solipsistic knowledge of its own autonomy, and is born only out of ritual, "where all's accustomed, ceremonious." The question then becomes, why does the falconer's loss of control over the falcon betoken a lapse in the maintaining of ritual, and we thus face a dilemma. Either the opening image reduces to an emblem of ceremony, which trivializes the entire poem, or else it does refer to man's mastery over nature, in which case Yeats has not provided any demonstration that a loss of such mastery necessarily leads to the abandonment of elitest ritual. Either way, an aesthetic difficulty exists, which critics continue to evade.[FN 17]
With the second stanza, heretofore evaded difficulties crowd upon the detached reader, if he can resist not only Yeats's heroic rhetoric but also the awed piety of the exegetes. The poet (or poem's speaker) says "surely" revelation, the uncovering of apocalypse, is at hand, but what *in the poem* justifies that "surely"? Mere anarchy does not always bring on revelation, and we would all of us be scarred with multiple apocalypses by now if every loosing of a blood-dimmed tide had compelled a final reality to appear. Presumably the poet's repetition of "surely" merely indicates his own uncertainty, but nothing in the poem justifies the subsequent and merely misleading outcry that the Second Coming, with all of its traditional reverberations, is upon us. In fact the Second Birth of the Sphinx of Egypt, *even in the poet's personal vision* or private apocalypse, is what comes upon him, and us. This is not unimpressive in itself, and the most indisputable lines in the poem proclaim the origin and nature of the vision. Difficulty enters again when the vision ends, and Yeats claims an access of knowledge, if not of power, on the basis of his vision. He claims to know one thing, and pretty clearly a related fact, by presenting the second part of his knowledge as a climactic rhetorical question. For twenty centuries the Sphinx or Urizen, demonic parody of angelic or imaginative man, has been vexed to nightmare by the Incarnation, by the perpetual image of a myth of *primary* salvation (how to keep *A Vision's* terms out at this point, I do not know). This nightmare of Christian history is over, even as Enitharmon's dream of the Christian centuries ends in Blake's *Europe*, when Ore is re-born as the French Revolution. The Egyptian Sphinx is the rough beast who slouches toward Bethlehem to be re-born, not born, in place of the re-birth of Christ. Once the initial shock is set aside, Yeats's closing image is surely replete with difficulties. Christian apocalypses do not visualize the Child born again at Bethlehem; that is not the Christ of Revelation. There is imagistic desperation in Yeats's closing rhetorical lunge. Has he earned his ironic reversal of his own arbitrary use of the Christian reference? And is his closing image coherent in itself? In what sense will the rough beast be "born" at Bethlehem? Clearly, not literally, but is it legitimate then to use "born" for what would actually be a demonic epiphany?
The power of *The Second Coming* is not called in question by these smaller questions, but perhaps its artistry is. Winters was justified in observing that
<quote>
... we must face the fact that Yeats's attitude toward the beast is different from ours: we may find the beast terrifying, but Yeats finds him satisfying -- he is Yeats's judgment upon all that we regard as civilized. Yeats approves of this kind of brutality.[FN 18]
<unquote>
But Winters was too idealistic when he concluded from this that a great poem could not be based, even in part, on "a homemade mythology and a loose assortment of untenable social attitudes." Much major poetry has been founded, in part, upon such odd materials. And one needs to dissent from Winters's judgment that the ideas of *The Second Coming* are "perfectly clear." There is a puzzle about the entire poem, which is why Yeats risked as much arbitrariness and incoherence as the poem possesses. The reason is somewhere in the dark area that the still undeveloped critical study of poetic influence must clarify. Yeats's swerve away from his precursors, in *The Second Coming* as elsewhere, is in the direction of a Gnostic quasi-determinism. The meaning of *The Second Coming* turns upon Yeats's deliberate misinterpretations of apocalyptic poems like Blake's *The Book of Urizen*, *Europe*, and *The Mental Traveller*, and of Shelley's *Prometheus Unbound* and *The Witch of Atlas*. A Vision deliberately associates *The Second Coming* and *The Mental Traveller*, and Yeats's late essay on *Prometheus Unbound* explicitly chides Shelley for not sharing the attitude of the speaker of *The Second Coming*:
<quote>
Why, then, does Demogorgon . . . bear so terrible a shape? . . . Why is Shelley terrified of the Last Day like a Victorian child?[FN 19]
<quote>
What *The Mental Traveller* reveals is the hopelessness of cycles, unless the Imagination dares to break through them. As for Demogorgon, his shape is not terrible, and does not trouble the sight, because he is a formless darkness, the agnostic's vision of historical reversal. Yet he does speak, unlike Yeats's Sphinx, and what he says is a considerable contrast to *The Second Coming*:
<quote>
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent; To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;[FN 20]
<unquote>
To do this, Demogorgon simply concludes, is to be free. What the contrast between Shelley and Yeats, or Blake and Yeats, suggests is the problem not of humaneness in apocalyptic poetry, but of freedom even in the context of apocalypse. To Yeats, like any other Gnostic, apocalypse is the fiction of disaster, and *The Second Coming* is an oracle of an unavoidable future. What is a Last Judgment for, in the vision of Yeats's precursors? "A Last Judgment is not for the purpose of making Bad Men better but for the Purpose of hindering them from oppressing the Good with Poverty & Pain."[FN 21]
There is something in the power of *The Second Coming* that persuades us of our powerlessness. Other poems of Advent by Yeats, including *Leda and the Swan*, share in this characteristic. The common reader suffers many mysteries, whose very menace makes for an augmented influence upon him. It is hardly the function of criticism to deny these mysteries, but it need not be the role of criticism to celebrate them. If the good time yet comes, as the faith of Blake and Shelley held it must, *The Second Coming* may impress the common reader rather less than it does now.
<end Bloom excerpt>