Discussion Topic
Interpretation of "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" from Yeats's "The Second Coming"
Summary:
The lines "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" from Yeats's "The Second Coming" suggest a world in chaos and disintegration. They imply that societal structures and order are collapsing, leading to widespread disorder and anarchy.
Explain the line from Yeats's "The Second Coming": "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world".
William Butler Yeats's line—part of which would inspire the title of Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart—speaks to the First World War's disruption of previously held, self-evident truths. Ideas about morality, identity, and social roles changed radically. The war led to old empires, which had already been crumbling, falling apart—particularly the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serbian Gavrilo Princip which acted as the catalyst for the war.
Moreover, some of the conditions of President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points required certain European countries to give up certain colonial holdings and to redraw borders within the continent in a way that respected the autonomy of certain ethnic groups.
The "center" that had previously held nations and peoples together could no longer "hold." This disillusionment with postwar life was best reflected in the visual art and literature of the time, which sought new...
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modes of seeing the world and of describing its conditions, due to previous models no longer being sufficiently expressive.
With this line, Yeats was suggesting that the foundations of Western culture, in particular Christianity, were falling apart. In the wake of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, European society was experiencing extreme social, cultural, and political unrest. Yeats sees in this unrest the end of a historical cycle, one which had seen the rise, and, he thought, the fall, of Western civilization. After the "center" collapsed, "mere anarchy" would be loosed upon the world, to be replaced, ultimately, with something that Yeats fears, a "rough beast" that "slouches toward Jerusalem." Particularly in the passage in question, Yeats is evoking apocalyptic images, but he is not suggesting that the new era ushered in will be the Second Coming of Christ, but the birth of something new and frightening.
Can you summarize these lines from "The Second Coming"?
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned."
In these lines from “The Second Coming,” Yeats is describing the catastrophic effects of the breakdown of the current period of history.
This period, represented by a gyre or spiral, has been in place since the birth of Christ. But in keeping with Yeats's theory of historical change, it is rapidly coming to an end. And as it does so, it unleashes powerful forces of bloodshed, anarchy, and chaos.
In the aftermath of the First World War, Yeats sees about him the signs of imminent disaster. All the old certainties have been destroyed or are in the process of being destroyed as the two thousand-year-old gyre comes to its end.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
In other words, the foundations of the world we know are crumbling.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
With the breakdown of order and stability comes anarchy, which has now been let loose in the form of revolutions and uprisings against the established order.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
Somewhat inevitably, all this chaos, all this anarchy, is accompanied by violence and bloodshed. The transition from his period of history to the next will not be a peaceful one. On the contrary, this will be the end of innocence.