SOURCE: "The Second Coming': Coming Second; Coming in a Second," in Irish University Review, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring/Summer, 1992, pp. 92-100.

[In the following essay, Deane studies "The Second Coming" in relation to the accompanying poems of Michael Robartes and the Dancer, concentrating on its combined sexual and historical themes.]

Yeats's famous poem "The Second Coming" is concerned with an ending and a beginning, both of them so interfused that it is scarcely possible to say where the distinction between them can be found.¹ The poem does indicate the moment when they appear to disengage. "Hardly are those words out / When. . . . " The phrase "The Second Coming" has just been completed for the second time when the action of that coming commences with the "vast image". Indeed these first eleven lines have several repeated words and phrases: "Turning and turning", "falcon / falconer", "loosed", "surely", "at hand".² Further, the definite article, used eleven times, is strategically important in the establishment of the pattern of repetition. It insinuates a complicity with the reader, a knowingness. We can specify what the falcon, the tide, the ceremony, the best, the worst are because the surrounding poems of the volume Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) tell us. In the vicinity of "The Second Coming", poems like "The Leaders of the Crowd", "Towards Break of Day", "Demon and Beast", "A Prayer for my Daughter", "A Meditation in Time of War", "To be Carved on a Stone at Thoor Ballylee" provide a narrative sequence of which "The Second Coming" is an integral part. They help us to know what "the ceremony of innocence", "the worst" and all other agents and conditions of the poem's action are. As is always the case, a Yeats poem is, in a sense, a quotation from the volume in which it appears. Michael Robartes and the Dancer has a group of poems at its centre about Easter 1916 and "The Second Coming" is reputedly about the Russian Revolution of 1917. Both of these political moments are dramatised as part of a larger theatrical dispute that dominates the whole volume. It takes the usual Yeatsian form of a collision between opposites out of which might come unity or, more likely and less heroically, release from the trial of strength between them into a limp, exhausted freedom. It is the sort that he writes of in "Demon and Beast", when a floating (not a soaring) bird could please him:

Being no more demoniac
A stupid happy creature
Could rouse my whole nature.

The "freedom" he wins from "hatred and desire" is not gratifying.

Yet 1 am certain as can be
That every natural victory
Belongs to beast or demon,
That never yet had freeman
Right mastery of natural things,
And that mere growing old, that brings
Chilled blood, this sweetness brought;

Freedom is a poor thing compared to the bestial and/or demonic energies that create the force field in which we live most vitally. This casts some light on the group of poems about the Easter rebellion ("Easter 1916", "Sixteen Dead Men", "The Rose Tree", "On A Political Prisoner" and, less directly, "The Leaders of the Crowd"). It is not freedom, its legitimacy or otherwise, that concerns Yeats. It is the energies that fought for it, the demonic return to Ireland of what he believed to have been effectively repressed, even though the last two poems in this sequence would seem to indicate that he believed the repression had been renewed in the intervening five years and that the abstract mind had taken over again. But "Easter 1916" is, in an ambiguous, questioning way, wondering if the rebellion had been a Second Coming of the daemonic that had then yielded to its malign intimate, the Bestial, represented by the Blackand-Tan atrocities in the War of Independence and by the era of bloodshed that included the First World War and the Russian Revolution. The ambiguity is not wholly centred on the Easter Rebellion as such. It arises from the distinction that this book struggles to make between Demon and Beast, between a violence that is renovatory and one that is destructive. These impulses are so intertwined that they can scarcely be separated. But it is in such a struggle that humankind achieves its greatness. Freedom is what is left after the struggle is over, "mere growing old".

"The Second Coming" poses a question in the form of a prophecy; equally, it proposes a prophecy in the form of a question. The prophetic element, the vision of the stirring to life of the Rough Beast from its two-thousand year long sleep, almost overrides the question, since it implies catastrophe in so unmistakable a fashion that there is no room left to doubt that this is a demonic energy that has, through repression, become bestial. The echoing of the Book of Revelation (in specific words and phrases like "loosed" and "at hand" as well as in the title, repeated twice in the poem, and in the biblical geography) confirms the impression of terror. But the Beast is not imitating Christ's Second Coming at all. It is imitating his first coming, by going to Bethlehem to be born. The second coming is a rerun of the first, not an analogue for the biblical Second Coming. It is, in a very specific sense, like the Beast of Revelation, an Anti-Christ, a reverse image of the First Coming but not a prelude to the Second.

It is here that the element of questioning begins to reassert itself against the element of prophecy. This "Egyptian" beast is going out of bondage over to Palestine to be born. The double biblical reference here—the liberation of the Jews from Egypt and the Flight into Egypt of the Holy Family—collaborates with the tropes of secondness and of reversal of direction that dominate the poem. The manner of the Beast's going ("slouches") is important. But it has already come to life; in what sense then will it be born—or born again? Will it be reborn as the thing it is, or will it be reborn as something different? It would seem that this nightmarish vision can only be known for what it is when it is interpreted, when the Rough Beast of the dream is born again as something which represents what was "vex'd to nightmare" by the "rocking cradle". The manger, mutated into a rocking cradle, a domestic and familial object, emblematic of a nursery peace and comfort, is, in this guise, an oppressive emblem. Christianity oppressed, suppressed or repressed demonic energies that have now gone bad. In their release they bring destruction with them. But it is a release. This peculiar version of the second coming may, after all, have its redemptive component within it because the therapeutic moment has arrived. The unconscious has finally spoken. The phrase that, in Christian belief, signalled the end of human history, has precipitated the beginning of another phase, one dominated by those very energies that had been hitherto occluded. It is a very potent question after all what this Rough Beast is or what it will become when it reaches its Bethlehem, its symbolic place, to be born again in the human imagination. Yeats spent so much of his life in the pursuit of those deep energies of the occult, almost cancelled in the modern world, that he could scarce forbear to cheer their sudden rearrival, however apocalyptic the form it took.

The second coming is bestial but it is also vague. It is "a vast image", "a shape"—the first nouns in the poem preceded by the indefinite article. Just as the definite article worked its effect by insinuating a complicity with what is known, so the indefinite article conversely achieves its contrasting effect by enhancing the sense of something unknown, the more sinister for being indefinite. It is also the more sinister for being a private, personal symbol. Yeats's own presence comes into the poem at the strategic moment when the first eight lines of what could have been a sonnet like "Leda and the Swan" are resumed, not into a sestet, but into a full sonnet. We not only have a sonnet and a half, we have an aborted sonnet that is then reborn as a full one, as the poem itself comes for the second time, brought to its full formal strength by the sudden intervention of the poet who now reveals himself to be the speaker:

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out...

The words are spoken and suddenly, in a flash, the vision comes. It comes in that second after speech and belongs to sight. The poem began with the falcon that "cannot hear"; it breaks at a critical point into speech and then continues as sight, vision. But the vision is, paradoxically, the more indelible for its vagueness. It is a personal vision but it is also public, since it is both a shape that is emerging from "somewhere" in the desert, and it is also recognisably the Egyptian Sphinx. At least, it is Sphinx-like, traditionally mysterious and yet known. But it is also a repetition. This creature too, like the apocalypse that has seized Europe, is announced by the wheeling birds, whose punning action ("Reel shadows") reiterates that of the falcon.

Still, this is not only a second coming, it is a coming that is second to a previous one—or, rather, to several previous comings that belong both to this poem and to the volume in which it appeared. In "Solomon and the Witch", "An Image from a Past Life" and "Under Saturn" images return, prophesying something ominous. The cockerel in "Solomon and the Witch" that "Crew / Three hundred years before the Fall" crows again because he thought

'Chance being at one with Choice at last,
All that the brigand apple brought
And this foul world were dead at last.'

The cockerel may be mistaken. As the Witch points out,

'Yet the world stays.'

So, replies Solomon,

'Maybe an image is too strong
Or maybe is not strong enough.'

The female lover in "An Image from a Past Life" puts her hands over her beloved's eyes to conceal from him the female image from a past life that she cannot understand, knowing only

... I am afraid
of the hovering thing night brought me.

In "Under Saturn", the return image is that of an ancestor who died "before my time" and is yet "like a vivid memory". The labouring man "who had served my people" cried out:

'You have come again,
And surely after twenty years it was time to come.'

It would seem that the cry was addressed to the poet himself, reincarnated as his ancestor, returning now to "that valley his fathers called their home." Later in the volume, "Towards Break of Day" the lovers dream, he of a waterfall on Ben Bulben, she of the white stag of Arthurian legend. The question is,

Was it the double of my dream
The woman that by me lay
Dreamed, or did we halve a dream
Under the first cold gleam of day?

What all these poems have in common is a questioning of the status of the vision. They are enactments of the issues raised in the fictional correspondence between Michael Robartes and Owen Aherne that Yeats cited in his 1921 note to this volume. In his analysis of dreams, Robartes claims that "the followers of Kusta-ben-Luki"

. . . distinguished between the memory of concrete images and the abstract memory, and affirm that no concrete dream-image is ever from our memory.

In a later passage, Yeats cites Robartes writing to Aherne in a letter dated 15 May 1917:

'No lover, no husband has ever met in dreams the true image of wife or mistress. She who has perhaps filled his whole life with joy or disquiet cannot enter there. Her image can fill every moment of his waking life but only its counterfeit comes to him in sleep; and he who classifies these counterfeits will find that just in so far as they become concrete, sensuous, they are distinct individuals; never types but individuals. They are the forms of those whom he has loved in some past earthly life, chosen from Spiritus Mundi by the subconscious will, and through them, for they are not always hollow shades, the dead at whiles outface a living rival.'

These forms he calls the Over Shadowers. The same "subconscious will"

. . . selects among pictures, or other ideal representations, some form that resembles what was once the physical body of the Over Shadower, and this ideal form becomes to the living man an obsession, continually perplexing and frustrating natural instinct. It is therefore only after full atonement or expiation, perhaps after many lives, that a natural deep satisfying love becomes possible, and this love, in all subjective natures, must precede the Beatific Vision.

Yeats goes on to say that he does not think he "misstated Robartes' thought" in allowing the woman and not the man of "An Image from a Past Life" to see the "Over Shadower or Ideal Form". Images, he says, "in moments of excitement . . . pass from one mind to another with extraordinary ease." Thus,

The second mind sees what the first has already
seen, that is all.

As a commentary on the love poems of Michael Robartes and the Dancer, this is all quite helpful. Robartes and the Dancer, Solomon and the Witch, the "He" and "She" of "An Image from a Past Life", are engaged in a very Yeatsian kind of love talk—post-coital discussion of how to overcome the sense of imperfection and separation that has been exacerbated by a dream, a vision, an allegory:

In this altar-piece the knight,
Who grips his long spear so to push
That dragon through the fading light,
Loved the lady; and it's plain
The half-dead dragon was her thought,
That every morning rose again
And dug its claws and shrieked and fought.

This is a dragon that has to be killed over and over; Solomon and the Witch must also make love again in the hope that the language of a real, not a false coming (or crowing) may be heard. Repeated love, repeated sexual climax is part of the process of atonement, the purgation that will perhaps some day make the Beatific Vision available. But Robartes has not completed his system. Aherne has to be shocked into the further realisation that

The mind, whether expressed in history or in the individual life, has a precise movement . . . and this movement can be expressed by a mathematical form. .. . A supreme religious act of their (the Judwalis') faith is to fix the attention on the mathematical form of this movement until the whole past and future of humanity, or of an individual man, shall be present to the intellect as if it were accomplished in a single moment. The intensity of the Beatific Vision when it comes depends upon the intensity of this realisation.

This passage leads on to the well-known characterisation of the intersecting cones and gyres, outward and inward sweeping, with the contemporary world reaching its greatest and fatal expansion, preparing

not the continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash, though in a flash that will not strike only in one place, and will for a time be constantly repeated, of the civilization that must slowly take its place.

The historical turn, like lovers, has to come again and again; with each flash of contact, the images appear, slowly emerging out of phantasmagoria to achieve their full form in a mathematically defined system. These images have to keep coming. They are never originary, since they have taken their form, inverted, from what has gone before and is now at the point of exhaustion. They are always coming second, and they come in a second, in a flash, and each sexual-historical lightning strike produces an image that may or may not be sufficient to represent the end of life and history. The only vision that can represent that is, per impossibile, the Beatific Vision which does not represent anything but itself, which simply is.

Nevertheless, the poem "The Second Coming" is clearly a hellish vision. Just as it has its anticipations within the volume in which it occurs, it also has its anticipations in history, some of which are visible in the early drafts. The Russian Revolution of 1917 has, as its great prefiguration, the French Revolution. The degree to which Yeats drew upon and concealed his sources in Burke, Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth, Nietzsche and others has been well-documented as has the contribution of his early experiments with MacGregor Mathers in the Order of the Golden Dawn.³ He envied the women of the circle for their capacity to form vivid mental images. Patrick J. Keane tells us that in the experiments with Mathers, Yeats reported that for him

. . . 'sight came slowly, there was not that sudden miracle as if the darkness had been cut with a knife, for that miracle is mostly a woman's privilege.' This simile reappears in the drafts of the clairvoyant section of 'The Second Coming'. Groping for figurative language with which to introduce the mysterious moment just prior to the vision of the vast image rising up out of 'Spiritus Mundi', Yeats first wrote: 'Before the dark was cut as with a knife.'⁴

The "woman's privilege" is repeated in the vision of this poem. We know that Yeats was deeply affected by Burke's lament for Marie Antoinette in his Reflections on the Revolution in France and that the sexual mutilation of the Princesse de Lamballe's body was one of the horrific moments of the Terror of September 1792 that registered deeply on him. The murder of the Tsar's family in Russia, the monstrous rebirth there of German Marxism, the drafts that speak of the "second birth" rather than the second coming, the reference to Bethlehem and the inevitable association with the Virgin birth (later reimagined in the Greek fable of "Leda and the Swan"), the fact that the phrase "Rough Beast" is applied by Shakespeare to Tarquín in The Rape of Lucrece⁵ all give to the second stanza of the poem a more specific inflection of sexual violation, threatened by

A shape with lion body and the head of a man.

Between the idea of a second "coming" and that of a second "birth", the poem reveals its conflict. There is a welcome given to the male coming, to its brute strength, its renewable energy, its destructive power. But there is also a horror at the consequences of its emergence, the suffering of the female figure who is represented only by contextual reference and echo and yet who is the reigning figure over "the ceremony of innocence" celebrated in the succeeding poem, "A Prayer for my Daughter". The second coming of this male force will be a violation that results in a monstrous birth. The hand that rocked the Bethlehem cradle may have, like the Virgin, or Marie Antoinette, or the Tsarina of Russia, ruled the world in some sense. But now the mob-beast has risen in male fury to put an end to all that Christian, familycentred ceremony in a threatening, slouching rapist's walk into the Holy Land that is a dreadful parody of its biblical antecedents.

How differently might we read the poem had Yeats made it, as he made the opening poems of the volume, a dialogue between a "He" and a "She". In this instance, it is the second stanza, the born-again sonnet, that would be spoken by the "She". However, the central point is that the vision of history and the vision of love relationships, both of which are part of Yeats's preoccupation in this book of poems, are superimposed one upon the other in "The Second Coming" and that Yeats's contradictory emotions of horror and welcome are ultimately visible in the poem's inner dialogue between a highly present male voice and an almost wholly concealed female one.

From 1910 onwards, Yeats remained loyal to a double narrative that generated conflict and regenerated energy in his poems. One was the narrative of revival, especially associated with Ireland and the occult; the other was the narrative of degeneration, especially associated with the modern world and science. "The Second Coming" is a poem that produces both narratives simultaneously. It is about the return of barbarism and about the return of the lost energies of the occult. In some respects, the poem wishes to interfuse these, to make one the function of the other; in other respects, it wishes to distinguish them and, further, to dwell on that moment, that split-second, when the distinction becomes clear. The poem (orits final question) is itself lacking in all conviction and full of passionate intensity. The Beast's hour has "come round at last" and this is a matter for celebration. But it is also a ravening beast that threatens violation and endless monstrosity. Caught between two value systems, Yeats represents one as male, the other as female, one as triumphant, the other as horrified, imbricating into the form of the poem itself the ironic admission that the best that can be said is second-best. "Things" could hardly be worse. But the threatened rape, when it does take place in "Leda and the Swan", answers the final question of "The Second Coming" with a question of its own. If the knowledge of the occult is to be reintroduced to the world, then that might be compensation for the destruction that it, vengefully and necessarily, has to bring with it. But in the coming of the Swan,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

If not, the darkness drops again. It all depends on that sexual-historical second in which knowledge comes with power. Otherwise, it will have to wait again for its second coming. And the daemonic, when it comes second, comes as the Bestial. Can the Bestial find a Bethlehem in which it can be born again as the daemonic? That would truly be a second coming.

NOTES

¹ A version of this essay was delivered as the Judith Wilson Annual Lecture on Poetry at Cambridge University, March 1991.

² All references to Yeats's poems and his commentary upon them are from Richard J. Finneran (editor), W.B. Yeats: The Poems (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1984). The poems of Michael Robartes and the Dancer are on pp. 175-190 and the commentaries on pp. 642-645 and pp. 646-648.

³ Patrick J. Keane, Yeats's Interactions with Tradition (University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1987), pp. 72-105.

⁴ Keane, p. 565.

⁵ Keane, p. 64.