Describe the “ vast image” in the second coming
The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening “gyre” (spiral), cannot hear the falconer; “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”; anarchy is loosed upon the world; “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The best people, the speaker says, lack all conviction, but the worst “are full of passionate intensity.”
Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” No sooner does he think of “the Second Coming,” then he is troubled by “a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx (“A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun”) is moving, while the shadows of desert birds reel about it. The darkness drops again over the speaker’s sight, but he knows that the sphinx’s twenty centuries of “stony sleep” have been made a nightmare by the motions of “a rocking cradle.” And what “rough beast,” he wonders, “its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
The "vast image" that the speaker of this poem sees is described in the second stanza, and is clearly a terrifying sight for him. This distant image which doesn’t encourage the poet, it rather troubles his sight. What Yeats wants to see is the coming of Christ but what he gets to see is something else. It’s a kind of Hallucination. Poet sees an unnatural image which has a lion’s body and head of a man and Emotionless as the sun. This creature is not going to bring any relief but only destruction. The beast is moving slowly and is compared with the real shades of angry desert birds or vultures.
This monster is of course symbolic, and many critics believe that this creature stands for the fear that Yeats felt at the overthrow of Tsarist Russia and also the rise of Fascism in Europe. Such ideologies that threatened to overrule the importance of placing the needs and best interests of individuals were greatly feared by Yeats, and this exchange of the freedom of the individual for totalitarian regimes can be seen in this creature with its gaze "blank and pitiless as the sun." Yeats wrote this poem as a response to contemporary events that he felt greatly concerned by, and therefore the creature he describes can be seen as a clear symbol of what he feared. Such portents communicate in the "second coming," a new birth awaited at Bethlehem, but with a radically different result compared to the arrival of Jesus.
Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, “The Second Coming” is one of Yeats’s most famous and most anthologized poems; it is also one of the most thematically obscure and difficult to understand. Structurally, the poem is quite simple—the first stanza describes the conditions present in the world (things falling apart, anarchy, etc.), and the second surmises from those conditions that a monstrous Second Coming is about to take place, not of the Jesus we first knew, but of a new messiah, a “rough beast,” the slouching sphinx rousing itself in the desert and lumbering toward Bethlehem. This brief exposition, though intriguingly blasphemous, is not terribly complicated; but the question of what it should signify to a reader is another story entirely.
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