SOURCE: "What Rough Beast?: Yeats, Nietzsche and Historical Rhetoric in The Second Coming'," in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4, Fall, 1995, pp. 362-88.

[In the following essay, Harrison focuses on Nietzschean suggestions in the language and imagery of "The Second Coming. "]

In the absence of a thorough examination of the impact on "The Second Coming" of Yeats's historical thought, it is arguable that the meaning the poet intended has not only been consistently overlooked, but that in general the poem has been taken to mean the opposite of what he intended. This essay offers a reassessment of the thought and imagery, of the response Yeats wished to evoke, and of the antithetical rhetoric of his dialectical view of history.

The text provides a striking example of the synthetic technique which produced some of Yeats's finest poems, one which condenses into imagery as much of the poet's thought as is possible but which also creates interpretative problems of which he was fully aware and which he attributed to the compressed, logical rigor of the ideas: "It is hard for a writer, who has spent much labor upon his style, to remember that thought, which seems to him natural and logical like that style, may be unintelligible to others" (Variorum 853). However, Yeats did not believe his philosophy to be either obscure or idiosyncratic; in fact he found confirmation of it in the work of Boehme, Heraclitus, Jung, Nietzsche, Spengler, and Vico and in Neoplatonism and the Upanishads. More surprisingly, he considered the intellectual equivalent of his own imaginative richness of suggestion to be the "packed logic," the "difficult scornful lucidity," of Alfred North White-head, Professor of Applied Mathematics at Imperial College, London, and subsequently of Philosophy at Harvard, and Bertrand Russell's collaborator on the Principia Mathematica (Letters 714). Russell's "plebeian loquacity" infuriated Yeats who admired "something aristocratic" in Whitehead's mind, a combination of terse clarity and suggestive complexity in thought and expression which he labored assiduously to attain, nowhere more so than in this poem.

Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" at the time he was collecting, from his wife's automatic writing, the material from which he created the philosophical system later set out in A Vision, the "very profound, very exciting mystical philosophy" which was to change radically the nature of his verse, and make him feel that for the first time he understood human life: "I live with a strange sense of revelation. . . . You will be astonished at the change in my work, at its intricate passion" (Letters 643-44). In reality this philosophy was neither completely new nor entirely mystical in origin, but rather a crystallization of what Yeats had read, thought, experienced and written over many years, the result of the process whereby he had "pieced [his] thoughts into philosophy" ("Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," Variorum 429). Despite Yeats's own conviction that this had produced a striking change in his writing, many critics have demurred. There has often been a reluctance to take Yeats's thinking seriously and, partly as a consequence of this, a refusal to accept that he successfully expressed his beliefs in his poetry, especially a skepticism regarding what Graham Martin has called his "cryptic symbolism" (230). In fact the symbolism in "The Second Coming" is anything but cryptic, except in the limited sense that it embodies some of the most profound elements of his philosophy in a concentrated and complex form which he recognized might prove not immediately intelligible to the reader, but which is entirely logical and consistent. Moreover, it mines a deep and rich vein—literary, philosophical, historical, political and mythical—which has little, if anything, to do with the occult.

The most fundamental question which has to be addressed in any interpretation of the poem concerns the response Yeats invites to the sphinx symbol, which is awesome, frightening, at last seemingly repulsive, yet which I shall contend paradoxically embodies much to which he was intellectually and emotionally committed. Critical opinion has predominantly interpreted the rough beast as a comfortless vision of horror, symbolizing the birth of a "violent, bestial anti-civilization" (Unterecker 165), while often suggesting that the poem as a whole consists of generalizations which do not require, or would not benefit from, detailed analysis.¹ Two recent commentaries have underlined the need for a critical reassessment by reiterating such views. In the first Thomas Kinsella asserts that the rough beast is related, visually and verbally, to the imagery and the "brutal diction" of "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen." The passage he quotes refers to atrocities committed by the Black and Tans at Gort in County Galway:

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror.

(Variorum 429)

In fact there is only a superficial resemblance between these lines and the imagery and "brutal diction" associated with the rough beast of "The Second Coming," in which the contemporary Irish context is inseparable from the wider context of Yeats's intellectual, social and historical perspectives. In the second, Nicholas Drake states that "the rhetorical phrases, repetitions . . . and metaphors are generalizations lacking any specific context" (52-54). On the contrary, this poem is a compelling example of the movement in Yeats's verse towards the concrete and particular, and the perspectives referred to above provide for the language and imagery the specific context which Drake denies exists.

Those critics who have attempted to provide such a context have not pursued the implications of the imagery with the rigor and fearlessness Yeats demanded of himself, which ultimately took him "Ravening, raging and uprooting . . . / Into the desolation of reality" ("Super-natural Songs," Variorum 563).² To explore these implications fully one needs clearly to identify, and make intelligible, the "natural and logical" thought process incorporated in the language and imagery, and to explore the poem's "imaginative richness of suggestion," what may aptly be called its "difficult scornful lucidity."

Yeats's thought is here compressed into images with an intensity rare even in his work and with a deliberately provocative Nietzschean element of paradox.³ Yeats's interest in Nietzsche was aroused at least as early as September 1902, when his American lawyer friend, John Quinn, sent him his own copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra together with copies of The Case of Wagner and A Genealogy of Morals. The first mention in Yeats's letters is dated by Wade 26 September 1902. He wrote to Lady Gregory: "You have a rival in Nietzsche, that strong enchanter. . . . Nietzsche completes Blake and has the same roots—I have not read anything with so much excitement since I got to love Morris's stories which have the same curious astringent joy" (Letters 379). It was shortly after this, and not I believe coincidentally, that he began to reconstruct his poetic style to give it more "masculinity," more "salt," and to make it more idiomatic. Yeats also annotated John Quinn's copy of Thomas Common's Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet, which appeared in 1901. Most of his annotations are on passages from A Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spake Zarathustra. According to Professor Donald Torchiana Yeats's library contained at least the following texts (the dates of English translations are given in brackets): The Case of Wagner (1895), A Genealogy of Morals (1899), The Dawn of Day (1903), The Birth of Tragedy (1909), Thoughts out of Season (1909), and The Will to Power (1909-10). He also possessed Daniel Halévy's Life, translated by his own biographer, J. M. Hone. Professor Torchiana's inspection of the library was hurried and by no means thorough and he acknowledged that there may have been other works by Nietzsche (Thatcher 143). With such a consuming and lasting interest in Nietzsche's work, and considering that he possessed three texts published between 1909 and 1910, it is unlikely that Yeats was not acquainted with Nietzsche's last work to appear, Ecce Homo, first published in German in 1908 and in English in 1911. In the course of this discussion of "The Second Coming" I shall point to some remarkable resonances between the work of these two writers in both language and meaning, while the critical emphasis will of course be on Yeats, not Nietzsche. Moreover, the question of literary influence is far too complex to be addressed here, and I am not in any way suggesting that either Yeats's language or meaning is directly derived from his reading of Nietzsche.

From the outset the poet invites, indeed demands, reference to his philosophic system, the central symbol of which contains two interpenetrating gyres or cones, perpetually in conflict and alternately victorious.⁴ Whatever mystical origins Yeats may have claimed for this idea, it is a recognizably dialectical, and not necessarily an occult, concept. Despite the importance of this symbolism in Yeats's thought, it is rarely introduced into his poetry as explicitly as it is here; its use is thus a direct pointer to what he intended to be the poem's specific philosophical and historical context:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer,

("The Second Coming" lines 1-2)

and throughout the poem bird imagery contributes to a coherent pattern, though not explicitly. In Jon Stallworthy's view the confusion which has surrounded the falcon image is dispelled once we realize that it was originally "hawk," but other connotations suggest that Yeats made the substitution precisely to avoid any association with "a gloomy bird of prey" (Stallworthy 18). Yeats adapted the dramatic description of the eagle that "stares on the sun by natural right" from Chaucer's Parlement of Foules:

Ther mighte men the royal egle finde,
That with his sharpe look perceth the sonne.

(330-31)

In the next few lines Chaucer describes the goshawk as "the tyraunt with his fethres donne / And greye" (a distinctly "gloomy bird of prey") while the falcon is "the gentil faucon, that with his feet distreyneth / the Kinges hond." The "falcon-gentle," Middle English "faucon gentil," is the female or young of the goshawk, while in modern falconry the word "falcon" tends to be used only of the female of the species. This does not necessarily make her any less predatory in reality but Yeats would have been familiar with these nuances. The "brazen hawks" of "Meditations in Time of Civil War" are of an entirely different species. There are several falcon echoes throughout the poem but the opening lines have undertones which are typical of Yeats's thought and poetry. The peregrine falcon was the most popular of the birds of prey when falconry was the sport of kings, its fierce alertness and lofty bearing earning its reputation as a bird of nobility. (Chaucer links it specifically with the highest-born.) Thus the separation of man and bird offers a striking image of social and cultural disintegration, not from a simple loss of communication, in itself redeemable and lacking the symbolic dimension required for the anarchic forces it heralds, but from Yeats's anguish at the disruption of the order and cohesion, the homogeneity of the aristocratic society he so admired.

There follows a subtle interplay between this disintegration of the aristocratic ideal, anarchy and violence. Successive drafts of the poem indicate that Yeats had in mind the First World War ("bloody frivolity"), the Bolshevik Revolution (the most striking instance of the destruction of an aristocratic society by egalitarian forces), the threat of anarchy and widespread violence in Ireland, all of which seemed to confirm Nietzsche's predictions, and the prophecies of Macgregor Mathers in the late 1890s, of immense wars accompanied by and followed by anarchy (Stallworthy 18-19). Moreover, Yeats's interlocking gyres are in part an attempt to present his cyclical view of history in visual terms. The cone representing the next and imminent era, the "antithetical dispensation," rises from its base to its apex, and similar pyramidal structures have been widely used to symbolize aristocratic, hierarchic societies; while the inverted cone representing the previous two thousand year cycle, the Christian era, rises to its point of greatest expansion, a widening gyre like the one in which the falcon loses its point of reference. The Christian era had culminated in the egalitarian mass society which Yeats found so distasteful. Historically the "centre," the nadir of the inverted cone, is the birth of Christ, the "first coming." However, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" because Christianity had "dwindled to a box of toys" (Autobiographies 333). In those drafts of the poem which Stallworthy managed to decipher, the blanket-word "things," which seems to have a looseness uncharacteristic of Yeats's drive towards greater precision of statement, is the only word that never changes its form. While it implies that literally everything, the whole social and cultural superstructure, is falling apart, there are other more compact and personal associations which echo the themes already mentioned. Yeats would also have had in mind the disintegration of material objects such as his own Thoor Ballylee, itself a crumbling monument to a threatened culture and incorporating a "gyre" in the form of a spiral staircase.

Violence, which for Yeats was symptomatic of the end of one era and the birth of another, becomes widespread as the inverted cone reaches its point of greatest expansion: "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" as the mass society promulgates its disruptive ideologies, a line that creates a singular effect from the inherent ambiguity of the word "mere" and its surprising juxtaposition with "anarchy." Here it has a primary meaning as a superlative in the sense of "sheer anarchy," suggestive of vastly destructive forces, and a secondary meaning as a scornful understatement, as in the phrase "a mere bagatelle." In an early draft Yeats had written "vile anarchy," which is more emphatic but which lacks the ambiguity and internal tension of the final version. The change was completely successful and provides for the first stanza a controlled center which does hold, and which allows the subsequent images of violence to intensify. It is interesting to identify the thought process by which in successive drafts of the poem the passing of innocence gradually assumes the social and cultural dimensions of the associated imagery, from the straightforward "some innocent has died" through "Old wisdom and young innocence," "The gracious and the innocent," "ceremonious innocence," to the greater complexity of "The ceremony of innocence is drowned." It is clear that Yeats increasingly associated this lost innocence with traditional values ("Old wisdom"), graciousness and ceremony, with what he was later to describe as his chosen theme—"traditional sanctity and loveliness" ("Coole Park and Ballilee, 1931") Immediately after "The Second Coming" in the Collected Poems Yeats placed "A Prayer for my Daughter" whose last stanza reads:

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

(Variorum 405-06)

Innocence is born of "custom and ceremony" which are other names for wealth ("the rich horn") and eminence ("the spreading laurel tree"), for what Yeats revered in the culture of the great houses. Indeed his own contribution to this culture may also be implied as the foliage of the laurel has long been an emblem of poetic distinction. On the other hand "arrogance and hatred" are "peddled in the thoroughfares" by political demagogues, those who "labour for hatred, and so for sterility in various kinds" (Notes to "Meditations in Time of Civil War," Variorum 827). In "The Leaders of the Crowd" Yeats describes these demagogues as slandering their opponents in order to "keep their certainty," which is compounded by a disastrous loss of confidence by those whose position has been systematically undermined by what Yeats calls "Whiggery," a "levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind." The wanton destruction of the great houses, of "all / That comes of the best knit to the best," would never enable "mean roof-trees" to acquire "the gifts that govern men" ("Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation"). The house was Coole Park, the home of Lady Gregory, both house and owner embodiments of the Ascendancy, the Anglo-Irish tradition Yeats so revered and of which he considered his own family to have been a part. Denis Donoghue has suggested that by this time Yeats had given up thinking of "the Big House" as an emblem of intelligence in active relation to power: "He saw it now as an aesthetic image of defeat, the enslavement of the strong to the weak" (56). This provides a context for the anguished complaint which ends the first stanza:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity,

a context in which "the best" and "the worst," words whose meanings are inevitably relative and subjective, echo the sense of the preceding imagery.

Yeats shared the Nietzschean, anti-libertarian view that Christianity had culminated in an egalitarian democracy which, disintegrating into "mere anarchy," could not control the violence, the "blood-dimmed tide," it had loosed on the world, signaling the approach of a new era: "All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, heterogeneous civilisation belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash . . . of the civilisation that must slowly take its place" (Variorum 825).

Such is the foundation on which he builds the symbolic structure of the second stanza. The revelation is indeed in the nature of a lightning flash and is both intensely personal and explicitly anti-millennarian, shattering the ostensible Christian conviction that anarchy and violence herald the Second Coming. "Hardly are those words out" before he catches his first glimpse of the monolithic sphinx, the "vast image" (originally "lost image") forgotten but surviving in Spiritus Mundi: "Antithetical revelation is an intellectual influx neither from beyond mankind nor born of a virgin, but begotten from our spirit and history" (A Vision 262). For Yeats a "very ancient symbol" was more than a literary device; it was a part of the "dwelling house of symbols, of images that are living souls," and of the "great memory that renews the world and men's thoughts age after age," which he named Spiritus Mundi (Essays and Introductions 79). He bought Thoor Ballylee not because it would make a comfortable home but because the tower, "important in Maeterlinck as in Shelley," was an ancient symbol he could actually live in. Indeed it fulfilled the requirements of a perfect symbol: it visibly existed and had a physical history (Gordon and Fletcher 26). These attributes are shared by the lion-bodied "shape," which, possessing a man's head, is clearly the male Egyptian sphinx, a royal portrait type through most of Egyptian history, symbolizing both the mighty strength and protective power of Egypt's ruler. All the Egyptian sphinxes are representations of Horus, the Egyptian God of Light, who was reborn each day as the rising sun, the symbol of renewed life, and who was also the Egyptian sky-god who took the form of a falcon, a bird whose figure represented his name and was thus sacred to him. There can belittle doubt that Yeats would have been familiar with this mythology; he had even considered introducing the revelation which eventually emerges as sphinx and rough beast with the words, "Surely the great falcon must come." He had long been aware of the sphinx as an ancient symbol, and in the 1890s it had something of a vogue among those symbolist painters he most admired. Charles Ricketts, "my education in so many things" (A Vision 298), had designed Wilde's Sphinx (1894), which is "among the most perfect and wholly characteristic productions of the 1890s," while Moreau's The Sphinx appeared as an illustration in the 1897 volume of the Pageant, a magazine in whose production Ricketts had a large share and in which one of Yeats's stories appeared in 1896 (Gordon and Fletcher 96, 98). Moreover his "instructors" had impressed on Yeats the symbolic significance of the east that had affected European civilization—Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt: "The East in my symbolism .. . is always human power . . . stretched to its utmost" (A Vision 257).

The vast image "troubles" his sight, implying not so much fear as imperfect vision, like a medium's confused first contact with an unknown spirit. Indeed the shape, situated "somewhere in sands of the desert," manages to appear monumental and vague at the same time, while often in Yeats the desert symbolizes the aridity of attitudes he disliked, notably liberal-democratic individualism and Christian-Platonic idealism and other-worldliness (Variorum 828). Plato in separating "the Eternal Ideas from Nature . . . prepares the Christian desert and the Stoic suicide" (A Vision 271), and this contrast between "idealism" and "nature" or "reality"—possibly derived from, certainly confirmed by, his reading of Nietzsche—became a cardinal feature of his philosophy. The creature has a "lion body and the head of a man," a fusion of awesome humanity and potent beast, of intellect and myth; it has "put on his knowledge with his power" ("Leda and the Swan"). All the predominant associations so far (royal sphinx, bird of nobility, king of beasts) are those of majesty and power, and in his notes to the poem Yeats allows his imaginary tribe to voice his own view of the revelation, which "will not come to the poor but to the great and learned and establish again for two thousand years prince and vizier" (Variorum 825).

Thus the sphinx's gaze is "blank and pitiless as the sun," reminiscent of "the lidless eye that loves the sun," the impassive look of the proud, stern, fearless mind of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy ("Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation"). The Christian or humanitarian is likely to find this pitiless gaze repugnant, but Yeats frequently repudiated humanitarian ideals. (He thought Synge necessary to the Irish dramatic movement partly because he was "incapable of a humanitarian purpose.") The debased "primary pity" of Christianity mocks the stoicism of a Swift, a Villon or indeed a Yeats, and contradicts the law of opposites; the Good Samaritan does not need his Lazarus, "they do not each die the other's life, live the other's death" (A Vision 275). Yeats was impressed by Nietzsche's claim that his attack on "die Mitleidigen," "the Pitying," a crucial element in his critique of Christianity, was in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld and Kant. Zarathustra, for example, warns his followers against pity: "All great love is above all its pity: for it seeketh—to create what is loved. ... All creators, however, are hard" (Thus Spake Zarathustra 102). Thus there is growing tension between a conventional response, pitiless = cruel, for example, and the response Yeats is inviting.

After "twenty centuries of stony sleep" the creature has difficulty "moving its slow thighs," a powerful naturalistic touch applied to the enigma but which also has its function in the poem's symbolic structure: "Does not every new civilisation . . . imagine that it was born in revelation, or that it comes from dependence upon dark or unknown powers, that it can but open its eyes with difficulty after some long night's sleep or winter's hibernation?" (Essays and Introductions 472). Stallworthy suggests that "slow thighs" replaced the "slow feet" of an earlier version because the latter sounded too human (22). It is equally likely that Yeats rejected this borrowing from Ezra Pound's "The Return," which he quoted in full when dedicating A Vision to Pound and in which he found expressed his own excitement at the re-birth or re-discovery of an ancient tradition, of forgotten values, and at the same time a sense of awe at such a fearful experience. The descriptions in this poem anticipate those of "The Second Coming" as unidentified figures return "half-awakened," with "tentative / Movements, and . . . slow feet," reminiscent both of the sphinx's labored progress and of its recent arousal after lying dormant for two thousand years (A Vision 29).

The darkness again obscures the revelation but not before it has engendered his certain conviction

That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle

implying a degree of understanding of the creature's frustration imprisoned in sleep in the Christian desert. Yeats enjoyed the description of the Christian phenomenon as a "fabulous, formless darkness" which blotted out "every beautiful thing," and "the darkness drops again" because the antithetical phases "are but, at the best, phases of a momentary illumination like that of a lightning flash" (A Vision 278, 284). They may even be embodied in some great man; when Yeats and his friends talked of Parnell's pride and impassivity (shared by the sphinx symbol), "the proceeding epoch with its democratic bonhomie seemed to grin through a horse collar." Parnell was the symbol that "made apparent, or made possible . . . that epoch's contrary: contrary, not negation, not refutation. .. . I am Blake's disciple, not Hegel's; 'contraries are positive. A negation is not a contrary'" (Variorum 835). The dialectic of a perpetual conflict between "contraries" or "two principles" provided a historical symbolism which avoided the idea that civilization continually returns to the same point, which implied development while denying progress, and which allowed him to see the world as "an object of contemplation, not as something to be remade" (A Vision 300), freeing him from any hint of reforming zeal. Thus his preference for the coming era was vindicated by historical necessity.

We have still to account for the transformation of the sphinx into the "rough beast" and to justify the view that we are meant to respond to that seemingly loathsome symbol with a mixture of awe and admiration, fear and favor. Yeats himself identified it with his vision of "laughing, ecstatic destruction" (Explorations 393), recalling his description of the "true personality" of Bishop Berkeley as "solitary, talkative, ecstatic, destructive," and thus inviting our approval since Berkeley, because of his opposition to the "materialistic" philosophies of Locke and Newton, represented Yeats's ideal of Irish intellectual achievement (Essays and Introductions 397). Moreover, it is in the nature of the dialectic that one era must end, and the next begin, in violence and Yeats's attitude to violence in his later years is unquestionably ambiguous. In terms of individual suffering he abhorred it; as an intrinsic element of historical necessity he accepted it, at times even welcomed it. Assuming the mask of Michael Robartes and employing a bird symbolism that illuminates the "shadows of the indignant desert birds," he wrote: "Dear predatory birds, prepare for war. . . . Test art, morality, custom, thought, by Thermopylae. . . . Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed, civilisation renewed" (A Vision 52-53). This reads like Nietzsche at his most provocative and raises the question of whether it should be interpreted literally or symbolically. Although in both Yeats and Nietzsche references to joyful or ecstatic destruction, or indeed to an apparent glorification of war, are deliberately ambiguous, they often suggest the destruction of outdated and outworn beliefs, a "transvaluation of values." Such references are legion in Nietzsche's work. A "definite joy even in destruction" [Nietzsche's italics] is one of the prime conditions of a "Dionysian life-task" and a prerequisite of creativity: "Change of values. . . . Always doth he destroy who hath to be a creator," including self-destruction: "Ready must thou be to burn thyself in thine own flame; how couldst thou become new if thou have not first become ashes!" (Ecce Homo 113. Zarathustra 74, 79). If anything, Yeats's invocation to love war because its horror can have a regenerative effect is even more provocative than Nietzsche's pronouncements, one of the more notorious of which reads: 'Tour enemy shall ye seek; your war shall ye wage, and for the sake of your thoughts! And if your thoughts succumb, your uprightness shall still shout triumph thereby! Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars—and the short peace more than the long" (Zarathustra 62). I think that in such an instance there is little doubt that what Nietzsche was alluding to was a philosophical "enemy" and a personal, intellectual "war." Yet this does indicate how a philosophy which purports to be inspirational can become imprisoned in its own logical systematization. Those like Yeats who advocate a transvaluation of values do not create new values but substitute opposites in place of those they wish to destroy and Nietzsche was certainly aware of this:

The time has come when we have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years: we are losing the centre of gravity by virtue of which we have lived; we are lost for a while. Abruptly we plunge into the opposite valuations, with all the energy that such an extreme overvaluation of man has generated in man (Will to Power 20, section 30).

Apart from the fact that this could be read as a gloss on "The Second Coming," consider how Yeats categorized his own transvaluation of values:

After an age of necessity, truth, goodness, mechanism, science, democracy, abstraction, peace, comes an age of freedom, fiction, evil, kindred, art, aristocracy, particularity, war (A Vision 52).

The substitutions are deliberate and great care has been taken in arranging the contrasting concepts. Compare this:

A primary dispensation looking beyond itself towards a transcendent power is dogmatic, levelling, unifying, feminine, humane, peace its means and end; an antithetical dispensation obeys imminent power, is expressive, hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical (A Vision 263).

To Yeats these were statements of fact, but more significantly they were statements of preference. Accordingly we have these symbolic contraries: a rocking cradle and a monolithic sphinx, the Second Coming and the vast image with an impassive gaze, Bethlehem and beast, since the "new civilisation [was] about to be born from all that our age had rejected" (Explorations 393), and the rough beast is bound for Bethlehem because "each age unwinds the thread another age had wound" (A Vision 270).⁵

The predictable response to these contraries is likely to be disgust because the emotive impact of the language is determined by the values of the dying era, values nevertheless which Yeats frequently repudiated, sometimes, as in "The Gyres," with "tragic joy":

When a civilisation ends . . . the whole turns bottom upwards, Nietzsche's "transvaluation of all values." . . . Yet we who have hated the age are joyous and happy. The new discipline wherever enforced or thought will recall forgotten beautiful faces. Whenever we or our forefathers have been most Christian—not the Christ of Byzantine mosaic but the soft, domesticated Christ of the painter's brush .. . we have been haunted by those faces dark with mystery, cast up by that other power that has ever more and more wrestled with ours, each living the other's death, dying the other's life (Explorations 433-34).

The poem is in some respects an attempt to achieve a poetic ideal, what Nietzsche called the "return of language to the nature of imagery" (Ecce Homo 106), and Yeats is using language in the same provocative way that Nietzsche did. His antithetical rhetoric creates tension between a conventional response to words with certain accepted moral overtones and the reaction he is inviting. Thus the massed imagery of the second stanza becomes increasingly disturbing, culminating in the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem, a provocative device favored by Yeats, often involving the use of oxymoron or paradox, because belief is not something we desire but comes from shock (Explorations 426). There is the "terrible beauty" of "Easter 1916;" the "turbulent child of the Altar," another symbol for antithetical revelation and a further contrast to the rocking cradle (A Vision 204); his invitation to love war because of its horror and because belief will be changed and civilization renewed; the frightening paradox of the last line of "A Bronze Head," where his extreme pessimism concerning contemporary civilization made him wonder "what was left for massacre to save." Above all there are the dichotomies between the dying and burgeoning eras, in which goodness, democracy and peace will give place to evil, aristocracy and war. To Yeats the reverential attitude to the Second Coming, the rocking cradle and Bethlehem indicated the superficiality of the Christian/Humanitarian viewpoint compared with the fearless acceptance of "reality." This is not to imply that the rough beast holds no terror but that the terror is fundamental to a proper understanding of reality:

I think profound philosophy must come from terror. . . . Whether we will or no we must ask the ancient questions: Is there reality anywhere? Is there a God? Is there a Soul? We cry with the Indian Sacred Book: "They have put a golden stopper into the neck of the bottle; pull it! Let out reality!" (Essays and Introductions 502-03).

Or as Yeats expressed it elsewhere, assuming the mask of Ribh in the last of the "Supernatural Songs:"

Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality.

(Variorum 563)

One of the memorable sensations of Yeats's childhood was seeing a lost design by Nettleship, God Creating Evil,⁶ a vast, terrifying face, a woman and a tiger rising from the forehead, which seemed blasphemous but at the same time profound: "It was many years before I understood that we must not demand even the welfare of the human race, nor traffic with divinity in our prayers. It moves outside our antinomies, it may be our lot to worship in terror: 'Did He who made the lamb make thee?' ' (Essays and Introductions 425).

The rough beast symbol offers contradictions or contradictory meanings that can co-exist, this being in the nature of the complex form. Yet often in Yeats, as in Blake and Nietzsche, apparent contradictions are complementary aspects of some profound truth. To some extent Blake's lamb and tiger were the inspiration for Yeats's contraries of rocking cradle and rough beast, which do not reflect a clash between Christian values and imminent chaos or a new barbarism, but between the contemporary, orthodox view of Christ and a Christ who "was still the half-brother of Dionysus," a figure partly grounded in myth, a "legitimate deduction" from the creed of St. Patrick. Such a deity embodied that "Unity of Being Dante compared to a perfectly proportioned human body, Blake's 'Imagination,' what the Upanishads have named 'Self: nor is this unity distant and therefore intellectually understandable, but imminent, differing from man to man and age to age, taking upon itself pain and ugliness, 'eye of newt, and toe of frog'" (Essays and Introductions 518). This echoes Nietzsche's references to the Hellene's "longing for the ugly," the resolute will to pessimism, to tragic myth, "to a conception of all that is terrible, evil, mysterious, destructive, fatal, at the basis of existence." This was a manifestation of a transvaluation of aesthetic values and became essential to his own aesthetic of tragedy and the sublime (Ecce Homo 152, 68). Nietzsche admired those he identified as the first European artists with a "universal literary culture," particularly Wagner and the representatives of French romanticism, who were "great discoverers in the realm of the sublime as also of the loathsome and dreadful . . . hankering after the strange, the exotic and the monstrous, the crooked, and the self-contradictory" (Beyond Good and Evil 194-95).⁷ Yeats was also impressed by such an aesthetic transvaluation; as artistic "synthesis" was being carried to, and beyond, its limits, as the new gyre began to stir, he was excited by the "discovery of hitherto ignored ugliness" (A Vision 300). Thus the rough beast can appear genuinely disgusting as it slouches along and yet even this is a facet of its "divinity." It is perhaps not too fanciful to suggest that Yeats may have had at least at the back of his mind the experience of an acquaintance who, "seeking for an image of the Absolute, saw one persistent image, a slug, as though it were suggested to him that Being which is beyond human comprehension is mirrored in the least organised forms of life" (A Vision 284).

Yeats was convinced that in two or three generations secular thought would have to accept that "mechanical theory" had no reality. Then it might be possible to recapture the sense that, in the words of the Syrian in The Resurrection, there is something human knowledge cannot explain, something of supreme importance that "lies outside knowledge, outside order"—the irrational, the supernatural, myth. Yeats's Christ is a living part of a great tapestry, much older than "the child born in the cavern"; it is the embodiment of his belief that "the supernatural and the natural are knit together." He was sure that this belief would become generally accepted and that it would regenerate European society: "To escape a dangerous fanaticism we must study a new science; at that moment Europeans may find something attractive in a Christ posed against a background not of Judaism but of Druidism, not shut off in dead history, but flowing, concrete, phenomenal. I was born into this faith, have lived in it, and shall die in it" (Essays and Introductions 518). This is not a plea for irrationality, but a desire to redress the balance between mechanical theory and myth, to reach an acceptance of reality of which myth, the supernatural, that something which "lies outside knowledge, outside order," are an integral part. Yeats's critique of Christianity and what he considered its ramifications—humanitarianism, democracy, scientific rationalism—was not an attempt to destroy an old tradition so much as an attempt to revive an even older one, to reassert a morality which Christianity had destroyed, or at least had stood on its head, to recapture a world-view which existed before "the umbilical cord which united Christianity to the ancient world" was cut, in which nobody can say where Christianity begins and Druidism ends.

Nietzsche conceived of Christianity as "hostile to life," an attempt to deny "the doubt and terror of reality." He thus invented a "fundamental counter-dogma," an anti-Christian counter-evaluation of life: "I baptized it, not without some impertinence—for who could be sure of the proper name of the Antichrist?—with the name of a Greek God: I called it Dionysian" (Ecce Homo 140, 156). In the Greek pantheon Dionysus, like Christ, was a God who died and was reborn; he was also a god of vegetation and animal life who took on different animal forms, one of which was the lion. (Cavendish 147).⁸ We have already seen that the Egyptian sphinx—part man, part lion—was a physical manifestation of just such another God, Horus, also represented by the figure of the falcon and revered as the rising sun, born afresh daily, the symbol of renewed life. Such an intricate pattern of ideas, symbols and myths cannot be coincidental nor entirely unconscious. It is a part of that pattern of thought which seemed to the poet as "natural and logical" as his style, and which gives to the sphinx/rough beast symbol the "imaginative richness of suggestion" that Yeats intended it to have.

"The Second Coming" is emblematic of the astonishing effect Yeats claimed his philosophy was having on both the intellectual content and the style of his poetry, and of the "intricate passion" that was beginning to characterize his work at this time. More than any other poem it marks the change to a more idiomatic use of language, a terse complexity of thought and imagery, an energetic muscularity of rhythm, in a word the "masculinity" he sought to achieve. L. A. G. Strong in a letter to Yeats expressed admiration for his ability to conjure up "with one swift, wrought phrase, a landscape, a sky, a weather and a history" (qtd. in Henn 111), and I have discussed what might be called Yeats's rhetoric of history. The idea of historical recurrence provided him with a consistent, even deterministic, interpretation of past and present and more importantly a prediction for the future. It helped him to come to terms with the violence of the contemporary world as an integral, necessary, even positive manifestation of a period of historical crisis. It also freed him from any suggestion of a revolutionary, or even a reformist, intention since the dialectical movement of history was itself in the process of engendering a civilization of which he could approve. This would be the antithesis of the two-thousand-year Christian era which he believed had culminated politically in a movement founded on Hobbes and popularized by the Encyclopaedists and the French Revolution, and which, having exhausted itself, was useless for centuries to come. However, in his preface to A Vision Yeats anticipated the predictable question and so asked it of himself: did he actually believe in his system, that history fixed from "our central date," the first day of "our era" (the birth of Christ), can be divided into contrasting periods of equal length? His answer was that he regarded them as stylistic arrangements of experience comparable to the cubes in the drawings of Wyndham Lewis, or the ovoids in Brancusi's sculptures: "They have helped me to hold in a single thought reality and justice" (25). They were thus the building blocks of his mature aesthetic, one which produced in his late poetry what is probably the finest body of work of any poet writing in English in the twentieth century.

I have attempted to divest the language and imagery of "The Second Coining" of the preconceptions that have been grafted onto it, preconceptions that were not Yeats's, and to explore what he intended to be its suggestive complexity. The following quotation from Richard Ellmann may be taken as indicative of the interpretation of the poem which has gained widespread currency:

In spite of his promise . . . that the next era would be subjective and preferable to the present, the god of that era, who rises from the desert sands . . . is no beneficent Dionysus but a monster. The poet's vision of horror surmounts his vision of the cycles. . . . Whatever the new dispensation can bring, it inspires only a sense of horrible helplessness to avert what no man can desire. . . . Yeats is not fond of Christianity .. . yet at the end of the poem he envisages something far worse. The final intimation that the new god will be born in Bethlehem, which Christianity associates with passive infancy and the tenderness of maternal love, makes its brutishness particularly frightful (164-65, 259-60).

While this recognizes that Yeats had little veneration for Christianity, it invests the poem's Christian allusions with a sense of reverence which not only did he not share, but towards which he was deeply antagonistic. Because of a failure, or an unwillingness, to respond to Yeats's antithetical rhetoric in the way he intended, such an interpretation not only attributes to him value judgments he did not make, they are to all intents and purposes the opposite of those he did make. For Yeats, "all things are from antithesis" (A Vision 268) and his rhetorical juxtapositions produce a dialectical tension as in the text he confronts: the center with a centrifugal force it cannot control; a blood-dimmed tide and the ceremony of innocence; the best and the worst, a lack of conviction and a passionate intensity; a stony sleep vexed to nightmare and a rocking cradle; a slouching, rough beast and Bethlehem. These are reinforced elsewhere by terror and beauty, horror and renewal, love and war, massacre and salvation, an altar and a turbulent child. Compared with such dynamic antitheses, the idea of a "beneficent Dionysus" would have been to both Yeats and Nietzsche a simple, and meaningless, contradiction in terms.

For Nietzsche the dionysian attitude was a passionate affirmation of life, of all aspects of life, including tragedy and pessimism, the doubt and terror of reality, pain and suffering. It led him to what he believed was his supreme philosophical insight, Eternal Recurrence, which was not so much Yeats's cyclical view of history as the recognition that this life is our eternal life, the willingness to affirm and relive each of life's experiences, however painful, again and again throughout eternity—"amor fati," the apotheosis of the present moment. In a sense this was Nietzsche's attempt to reclaim and reaffirm his own life, one which he believed had been unusually filled with pain and suffering. Yeats's idea of historical recurrence was a fusion of the personal and the world-historical. On the one hand it justified his rejection of the values and beliefs of the age, an age he characterized as looking beyond humanity to a transcendent power, as democratic, leveling, egalitarian, anarchic, heterogeneous, feminine, humane—"tender" qualities symbolized here by a rocking cradle, Bethlehem and The Second Coming. On the other hand it made it possible for him to reclaim for a future age those values he cherished, a future that would obey imminent power, would be aristocratic, hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh and surgical—"hard, astringent" qualities symbolized by a monolithic sphinx and a rough beast.

Thus the confrontation between the Second Coming and the rough beast occurs in Yeats's work in numerous forms, many of them Nietzschean in tone. Also writing out of a profound contempt for his age and what he considered to be its predominant values, Nietzsche almost willfully invited his contemporaries to misunderstand his rhetoric, his "philosophizing with a hammer": "Caesar Borgia as Pope! Do you understand me?" (Complete Works 16: 228). Not surprisingly most of them didn't. Nevertheless, this is a provocative assertion of a consistent theme in Nietzsche's work, the clash throughout human history of "Renaissance" and "Reformation" values—the confrontation between a "higher" order of values that are "hard" and "noble," that "say yea to life," that "assured a future," and "the opposing values of degeneration," which he characterized as the morality of decadence: "Have you understood me? Dionysus versus Christ" (Ecce Homo 24, 136, 145). What he was doing in fact was inviting his readers to be daring enough to understand him, and the same challenging themes and idioms are to be found in Yeats. In A Vision there is the same confrontation between Christianity and paganism, and between Christian and Renaissance values, which Yeats, like Nietzsche, loved to embody in representative mythological or historical figures; for example, the tender passivity of a Saint Catherine of Genoa and the hardness, the astringency of a Donatello or a Michelangelo (291).

Ultimately, however, despite their often contemptuous rhetoric, neither completely rejected Christian values. Nietzsche did believe that European culture in the second half of the nineteenth century needed a transfusion of those "hard," "noble" qualities he admired, a radical injection of will:

Nowadays the taste and virtue of the age weaken and attenuate the will; . . . consequently, in the ideal of the philosopher, strength of will, sternness and capacity for prolonged resolution, must specially be included in the conception of "greatness": with as good a right as the opposite doctrine, with its ideal of a silly, renouncing, humble, selfless humanity, was suited to an opposite age—such as the sixteenth century, which suffered from its accumulated energy of will, and from the wildest torrents and floods of selfishness (Beyond Good and Evil 137).

Nevertheless, this was not so much a complete transvaluation of values as a question of reorientation, of readjusting an internal balance of personality. He hoped for a Superman who would be not some future world-historical figure, but an individual ideal to be pursued by all strong, free spirits, "the Roman Caesar with Christ's soul" (Will to Power 380 section 983). While to some extent this was also true of Yeats (his concept of a Christ who was still the half-brother of Dionysus was almost certainly influenced by Nietzsche's slogan, "Dionysus versus Christ"), he thought more in terms of a historical dichotomy, of a dialectical "balance" provided by the alternating supremacy of opposing values, symbolized variously by the turning of the Great Wheel, by the whirl of interlocking gyres, or by the partial gyrations of the alternating rise and fall of the two ends of a seesaw. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche also claimed that "all the celebrated figures of the Greek stage—Prometheus, Oedipus, etc.—are but masks of this original hero, Dionysus. There is godhead behind all these masks" (229). When dedicating A Vision to Pound, Yeats wrote:

I would have him [Oedipus] balance Christ. . . . What if Christ and Oedipus or, to shift the names, Saint Catherine of Genoa and Michael Angelo, are the two scales of a balance, the two butt-ends of a seesaw? What if every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one sacred, the other secular; one wise, the other foolish; one fair, the other foul; one divine, the other devilish? (27-29).

With such a culture change foul becomes fair, the devilish becomes divine. In "The Second Coming" this metamorphosis is taking place.

NOTES

¹ For other examples of critical responses referred to here see Davie 76-79; Ellman 257-60.

² See Bloom 317-25; Bohlmann 178-79 (although his interpretation of the poem is necessarily very brief in the context of his general thesis, in my view it comes closest to the meaning Yeats intended); Jeffares 238-44; Melchiori 35-42; Stallworthy 17-25; Weeks 281-92.

³ For discussions of Nietzsche's influence on Yeats see Bohlmann; Thatcher 139-73.

⁴ Yeats's philosophical system is set out in A Vision. For explanatory accounts see Bloom 210-91; Ellmann 146-64; Schricker 110-22; Stock 122-64.

⁵ In the light of Yeats's consuming interest in Thus Spake Zarathustra, there is a remarkable similarity between Yeats's symbolism in "The Second Coming" and Nietzsche's in "The Three Metamorphoses": "But in the loneliest wilderness happeneth the second metamorphosis: here the spirit becometh a lion; freedom will it capture, and lordship in its own wilderness. Its last Lord it here seeketh: hostile will it be to him, and to its last God.... My brethren, wherefore is there need of the lion in the spirit? .. . To create itself freedom, and give a holy Nay even unto duty: for that, my brethren, there is need of the lion. To assume the right to new values—that is the most formidable assumption for a load-bearing and reverent spirit. Verily, unto such a spirit it is preying, and the work of a beast of prey" (43-44).

⁶ Gordon and Fletcher suggest that the drawing known as God with Eyes Turned upon His own Glory was the work Yeats referred to (93).

⁷ Zarathustra actively encourages his followers to embrace such an aesthetic: "Ye are ugly? Well then, my brethren, take the sublime about you, the mantle of the ugly" (63). Yeats suggested that Synge's tragic view of reality manifested itself as a "hunger for harsh facts, for ugly, surprising things" (Essays and Introductions 308), while according to Robert O'Driscoll, Yeats considered Synge to be "the living embodiment of the philosophical principles he was discovering in Nietzsche" (qtd. in Bohlmann 47).

⁸ For other non-Nietzschean discussions of Dionysus see Gernet 48-70; Flaceliere 11-87. For discussions of Nietzsche's concept of Dionysus and the Dionysian see Bohlmann 40-47, 59-62; Kaufmann passim; Silk and Stern chapters 3-10.

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