Echoes of the Ancestors: Literary Reverberations in Yeats's "The Second Coming"

Author(s): Simona Vannini

Source: The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies , Jul. - Dec., 1999, Vol. 25, No. 1/2 (Jul. -
Dec., 1999), pp. 323-336
Published by: Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25515278

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 Echoes of the Ancestors: Literary Reverberations
in Yeats's "The Second Coming"
SlMONA VANNINI

The archetypal fascination of "The Second Coming"1 lies in its extremely

inclusive capability to embrace and re-elaborate materials belonging to different
ages and traditions. Although the title of the poem suggests a Christian theme, the
mysterious allegory of its imagery symbolizes a more complex and many-faceted
representation of the coming of an antithetical cycle.
To better portray the universal drama of this historical transmutation within the
framework of this apocalyptic poem, Yeats condensed some literary echoes, the
Christian prophecy of Christ's second coming, the Theosophist belief in the cyclical
occurrence of avatars and his own personal fears for the European upheavals of
1917-1919: the Russian Revolution, World War I and the atrocities of the Black
and Tans. In the final version, however, the heterogeneity of all these topics is
transcended and harmonized as if in a symphony of thematic counterpoints.
Moreover, most of the specific details are finally elided to create an effect of
archetypal timelessness. The artistic richness of "The Second Coming" therefore
lies in its intricate, hidden network of historical allusions, occult speculations and
echoes of religious and literary traditions. During the process of composition of the
poem, each aspect occurs and dissolves as if to symbolize the complexity of
elements interacting and vanishing during the progress of human civilization.
According to Yeats, the history of humankind unfolds itself within a ceaseless
cyclical pattern of recurring events. In the poem this cosmological perspective on
human history is assumed by a first-person speaker. After witnessing the allegorical
manifestation of an antithetical historical cycle, symbolized by the "rough beast,"
the speaker achieves knowledge through revelation and finally understands the
principle underlying the cyclical recurrence and annihilation of historical eras:
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be bom?

In the poem the "rough beast" embarks on a backwards movement towards

Bethlehem, which is the geographical and historical origin of the Christian cycle.
This spatial and temporal return towards the origin represents the allegorical,
contrary itinerary of the new opposing gyre, which grows at the expense of the
previous one. In a note to the poem Yeats described this kind of revelation as a flash
when "the whole past and future of humanity [are] present to the intellect as if it
were accomplished in a single moment" (Variorum Editions 824). In the poem the

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 324 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

same experience of metaphysical revelation is masterfully expressed with allegori

cal language and apocalyptic imagery.
My purpose here is not to evaluate the aesthetic charm of the imagery of the
final version of "The Second Coming," but to analyze the genesis of some of these
images in relation to the sources of influence of the poem. Due to the variety of
sources that converge into "The Second Coming," I intend to restrain my analysis
to the main literary sources of inspiration and subsequently draw a map of the
imaginative genesis of the poem. I aim to integrate earlier scholarly studies of the
poem's literary reverberations and open a new enlarged insight into the interpreta
tion of the polysemous symbolism of "The Second Coming," particularly of the
"rough beast" and of the "falcon." In order to give evidence for my analysis and to
amplify details, I refer to some manuscript drafts of the poem and to some of Yeats's
prose writing.2
During the process of composition of "The Second Coming," literary reminis
cences emerge in multiple phonic, tonal and metaphoric guises. The lyrical density
of the verses is enriched by the infusion of Dante's symbolic figures, Shakespeare's
verbal cadences, Shelley's and Blake's literary reverberations. The most inclusive
and complex symbol of the poem is the "rough beast" in which numerous layers of
meanings converge. The final rhetorical question:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be bom?

reveals that the poet does not fully understand the nature of the beast. Moreover,
with this question Yeats puts a difficult dilemma and invites the reader to contribute
to the solution. The "rough beast," however, evokes St. John's description of the
beast in Apocalypse XIII, the vision of the four beasts of destruction recorded in
the book of Daniel VII, and the prophesy of Christ's re-birth in Matthew XXIV.
Paradoxically, the beast embodies the conflicting connotations of an Evil apoca
lyptic omen and the spiritual attributes of a New Christ. This series of positive and
negative religious attributes is broadened by the verbal and visual influences of
many literary references. Nietzsche's savage beast, with its Dionysian power, for
example, seems to have been a major literary inspiration for the enigmatic and
sinister character of the beast while its visionary connotations partly have figurative
sources. In 1950, T.R. Henn indicated three possible imaginative sources for the
rough beast. The first one is the image of the man-headed Sphinx, which Sturge
Moore drew for H.P.R. Friberg's translation of Villiers de I Isle Adam. The analogy
with the Sphinx suggests a correspondence between the pre-Christian cycle and the
approaching one. Other sources are: Charles Rickett's illustration for Wilde's
Salome and Blake's illustration of Beatrice addressing Dante from a chariot which
is drawn by a winged lion with an eagle's head. It is important to notice that Dante's
and Blake's influence on Yeats's imagination is not only figurative but also verbal
and theoretical.

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Echoes of the Ancestors 325

In 1953, M.E. Rudd pointed out a further contribution to "The Second Coming"
in some lines of "The First Book of Urizen," in which Blake describes Urizen
sleeping for several generations of creation before his second birth:
Ages and ages roll'd over him
In stony sleep ages roll'd over him. (119, emphasis mine)
In "The Second Coming" Yeats recalls Blake's verses in the phrase describing the
two hundred years of "stony sleep" of the "rough beast" during the Christian cycle:

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, (emphasis mine)
In addition to this precise echo, Blake's speculative contribution to the poem can
be seen in his theory of the conflicting gyres, as it is described by Yeats mA Vision:

Blake in the "Mental Traveller" describes a struggle, a struggle

perpetually repeated between a man and a woman [...] The
woman and the man are two competing gyres growing at one
another's expense. (133)
"The Second Coming" is structured on the same philosophical principle of "two
competing gyres growing at one another's expense." These gyres are cyclically
"Dying each other's life, living each other's death" (Explorations 430). Yeats's
contribution to this theory lies in his reading of the gyres as symbols of historical
cycles, which gives the poem not only a metaphorical but also an historical
character:

What I have found indeed is nothing new, for I will show

presently that Swedenborg and Blake and many before them
knew that all things had their gyres; but Swedenborg and Blake
preferred to explain them figuratively, and so I am the first to
substitute for Biblical or mythological figures, historical move
ments and actual men and women. (A Vision [1925] XI)
Like Blake, Yeats elaborates his own imaginative system but substitutes for
mythological and biblical figures, historical beings whose personalities are ana
lyzed in A Vision, in the chapter on the "Twenty-eight Incarnations."
A passage from Yeats's Autobiographies adds an autobiographical connotation
to the symbolic richness of the "rough beast," which is here represented as a real
experience. In this extract Yeats described one of his spiritualistic experiments:
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, but there rose before me mental images that
I could not control: a desert and a black Titan raising himself up
by his two hands from a heap of ancient ruins. (185)

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 326 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

In the manuscripts of "The Second Coming" the poet evoked the same miraculous
atmosphere to describe the revelation of the beast:
The Second Birth. Scarce had the words been spoken
and new hierarchy was rent as if it were cloth
Before the dark was cut as with a knife
And a vast image out ofspiritus mundi
Troubles my sight?A waste of desert sand (NL\ 13,588:14,5v)
In the final version of the poem particular details such as the dark, the knife and the
cloth gradually fall away because they restrict the universal perspective of the poem.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that in the esoteric experiments described in
Autobiographies, "the dark cut with a knife" was an omen for the revelation of a
"sudden miracle."
A further autobiographical reference to the revelation of the beast can be found
in the Introduction to Resurrection. Here the poet explicitly refers to a beast as a
symbolic emblem of "ecstatic destruction." Also in this case, as in "The Second
Coming," the beast, epitome of both ecstasy and destruction, is a symbol with
extremely ambivalent and contradictory connotations:

Had I begun On Baile 's Strand or not when I began to imagine,

as always at my left side just out of range of the sight, a brazen
winged beast that I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruc
tion? (Explorations 393)
In a footnote the poet adds: "Afterwards described in my poem 'The Second
Coming.'" In the manuscript-drafts of "The Second Coming" Yeats initially
assumed a "winged beast" or rather a "falcon" as the epitome of an approaching
antithetical era. The falcon's "ecstatic destruction" consisted of the overcoming of
the previous cycle:
Surely the great falcon must come
Surely the hour of the second birth is here (NLI 13,588: 14, 4r)
It is likely that Yeats later transformed the "great falcon" into a beast resembling
a Sphinx to avoid referential confusion with the image of the falcon of the first two
lines of the poem:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

In the above lines Yeats seems to have assumed the signifier "falcon" for prosodic
purposes. In 1963 Stallworthy suggested that the lexeme was changed from the
"hawk" of an early draft into "falcon" to create an effect of assonance with the word
"falconer." The two images carry, however, the same semantic significance. The
hawk represents for Yeats a very inclusive symbol which recurs throughout his
artistic career, carrying different connotative nuances. For a better understanding
of this image, an exhaustive example can be found in the play At the Hawk's Well,

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Echoes of the Ancestors 327

where the hawk assumes a very ambiguous significance. It was written in 1915,
just a few years before the composition of "The Second Coming." In the play, the
Guardian of the Well is possessed by the godhead and transformed into a hawk
which exercises a sensual fascination over Cuchulain by means of its enchanting
dance. With her metamorphosis, the Guardian becomes the agent through which
the superhuman manifests itself to the human world. The sense of attraction and
repulsion felt by Cuchulain during the dance of the hawk symbolizes the ambiguous
and antagonistic relationship between godhead and man. The hawk, therefore, is
the symbol of the superhuman's attempt to exercise its power over the human, but
it is also the emblem of the eternal conflict and desire between spiritual and
temporal worlds. In this paradoxical antithesis, violent antagonism and sexual
attraction mingle within the same symbol. The spiritual attributes of the hawk are
instead better exemplified in the great wheel of A Vision where the spiritual ideal
is represented by a wild hawk at the beginning of a cycle of complete objectivity.
Yeats explains another aspect of the symbolic relevance of the hawk in a note to
the poem "Meditations in Time of Civil War":
I suppose I must have put hawks into the fourth stanza because
I have a ring with a hawk and a butterfly upon it to symbolise the
straight road of logic and so of mechanism and the crooked road
of intuition: "For wisdom is a butterfly and not a gloomy bird."
(qtd. in Stallworthy, "The Second Coming" 25)
In "The Second Coming," the falcon embodies the multiple layers of the meaning
of the hawk. As an emblem of the conflict between human and superhuman its
escape from the falconer represents the Promethean act of rebellion and self-asser
tion of the human being against the dominion of the superhuman and the order
established by it. As a consequence, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
The literary source which seems to have contributed to the final metamorphosis
of the "hawk" into the "falcon" as a symbol of rebellion, is Dante's Inferno. Yeats
saw Dante as the supreme example of a school of visionary artists who "attained,
as a poet, to Unity of Being, [...] saw all things set in order [...] and was content to
see both good and evil" (A Vision 144). Yeats had a copy of Cary's translation of
Dante's Vision of Hell, which he thought to be the perfect representation of the
ceaseless conflict between reality and justice in a single vision.
In Canto XVII, Gerion, a monster with a human face, lion feet, and the body
of a snake carries Dante and Virgil from the seventh to the eight circle of Hell.
Virgil described the circuit of their flight as a wheeling gyre. During their journey
Virgil addressed Gerion with these words:

Gerion I now move thee: be thy wheeling gyres

Of ample circuit, easy thy descent [...] (The Vision 52)
Later Dante compared their descent to a falcon's flight:

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 328 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

As falcon that hath long been on the wing

But lure nor bird hath seen, while in despair
The falconer cries, "Ah me! thou stoop'st to earth,"
Wearied descends whence nimbly he arose
In many an airy wheel and lightning sits
At distance from his lord in angry mood. (The Vision 53)
Dante's contribution to "The Second Coming" therefore consisted of his influence
on the metaphor of the falcon, as a symbol of proud self-assertion. The falcon,
however, is also the "gloomy bird" representing the logic and the rationalism which
characterizes the contemporary dying gyre. This concept was extensively specified
by Yeats in a note to the poem:

All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating heterogeneous

civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the
continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash.
(Variorum Editions of the Poems 825)

In one of the early manuscripts of the poem the lexeme "gyre" was defined by the
adjective "intellectual."
intellectual gyre is
The gyres grow wider & more wide

falcon cannot hear

The hawk can no more hear the falconer (NLI 13,588: 14, 2r)
Yeats frequently pointed out the dangers of an intellectual and abstract under
standing of the world's dynamics. He expressed this concept in the poems "Michael
Robartes and the Dancer" and "A Prayer for my Daughter," both collected in
Michael Robartes and the Dancer. In these poems Yeats declared his dissent from
intellectual attitudes:

Opinion is not worth a msh; ("Michael Robartes")

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed. ("A Prayer")
The "intellectual gyre" of "The Second Coming" reveals Yeats's concern with the
intellectualization of the world and unmasks his worries for the spreading of
intellectual hatred and abstract opinions which dominate our present historical
cycle and influence in particular some women's minds.

Women, because the main event of their lives has been a giving
themselves and giving birth, give all to an opinion as if it were
some terrible stone doll. (Explorations 504)
In the poem the present era is symbolically epitomized by an "intellectual gyre."
Yeats's personal hatred of abstraction belongs to a literary tradition of dissent:

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Echoes of the Ancestors 329

I have learned from Blake to hate all abstractions. (Autobiogra

phies 181)
I divine an Irish hatred of abstraction likewise expressed by [...]
Burke in his attack upon mathematical democracy. (Explorations
351)
In Explorations Yeats asserts that abstraction destroys the "Unity of Being" and
threatens the freedom of the symbolic hawk:

I thought that in man and race alike there is something called

"Unity of Being", using that term as Dante used it when he
compared beauty in the Convito to a perfectly proportioned
human body. [...] I thought that the enemy to this unity was
abstraction not the distinction but the isolation of occupation, or
class or faculty:
Call down the hawk from the air,
Let him be hooded or caged
Till the yellow eye has grown mild,
For larder and spit are bare,
The old cook enraged,
The scullion gone wild. (Explorations 190-1)
In ,4 Vision Yeats foresaw the achievement of an "intellectual climax" of the Great
Year, as a sign of the complete systematization of the approaching antithetical
influx and subsequent reversal of our era. The individual human suffering employed
in this process of destruction and regeneration was belittled by the cosmological
perspective of the dying cycles. One stanza of "The Second Coming" was then
included to give lyrical evidence to the idea of a climactic achievement of intellec
tualization and consequent reversal of the gyre:

A primary dispensation looking beyond itself towards a tran

scendent power is dogmatic, levelling, unifying, feminine, hu
mane, peace its means and end; an antithetical dispensation
obeys imminent power, is expressive, hierarchical, multiple,
masculine, harsh, surgical. The approaching antithetical influx
and that particular antithetical dispensation for which the intel
lectual preparation has begun will reach its complete systemati
sation at that moment when, as I have already shown, the Great
Year comes to its intellectual climax. Something of what I have
said it must be, the myth declares, for it must reverse our era and
resume past eras in itself; what else it must be no man can say,
for always at the critical moment the Thirteenth Cone, the sphere,
the unique intervenes.

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 330 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

Somewhere in the sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. (263)
In conclusion, the falcon of "The Second Coming" is the symbol of the conflict
between human and superhuman forces. It embodies the intellectual connotations
of the dying cycle previously implied by the hawk and finally its flight ("Turning
and turning in the widening gyre") is the allegorical representation of the cyclical
recurrence of history. By contrast, the "indignant desert birds" of the second stanza
represent the ominous birds of the state of anarchy and disorder which inaugurate
the new antithetical cycle.

Dear predatory birds, prepare for war, prepare your children

and all that you can reach [...] (Explorations 425-26)
In 1979 Walter Evans suggested that Yeats appropriated the structure of
organization and the motif of revolution and consequent disorder of Wordsworth's
The Prelude. His hypothesis was demonstrated by a detailed comparative analysis
of "The Second Coming" and The Prelude. I believe that the topic of revolution,
so important in Yeats's poems, derives not only from Wordsworth but also from a
national literary source. The manuscripts of "The Second Coming" reveal an echo
of the Anglo-Irish heritage represented by Edmund Burke, who was explicitly
mentioned in one of the drafts:

And there no Burke to cry aloud (NLI 13,588: 14, lr)

In fact, Donald Torchiana in 1966 and Patrick Keane in 1988 suggested that Burke
was a source of political and literary inspiration for the poem. In Reflections on the
French Revolution Burke denounced the murderous excess of the French Revolu
tion and praised the majesty of Queen Marie Antoinette. Yeats, following Burke's
ideological example, referred to Queen Marie Antoinette in the drafts of the poem.
In the manuscripts, the French Queen is one of the victims of the massacre of the
Royal Family, but also the embodiment of "ceremonious innocence." For this
reason, her death represents the regal symbol of the destruction of social and ethical
values. This assumption is confirmed in the manuscripts by the interchanging
occurrence of the following lines:
Marie Antoinette has
Most brutally died (NLI 13,588: 14, 2r)
But ceremonious innocence has died (NLI 13,588: 14, 2v)
The above lines carry the same meaning in the drafts. However, following the
general tendency towards universalization of the imagery, in the later drafts of the
poem Yeats elided the reference to Marie Antoinette and to Burke. Nevertheless,

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Echoes of the Ancestors 331

Burke's influence can still be revealed in the symbolical likeness between the
"double-natured monster" representing the political distortions of modem civiliza
tion, described by Burke in Letters on a Regicide Peace, and the double edged rough
beast which embodies the paradoxes of the dying era and reveals the approach of
an antithetical one. In so doing, the beast symbolizes the intersection of the two
gyres.
In 1970 A.M. Gibbs indicated another literary source for the poem in Shake
speare's description of Tarquin in Lucrece:
Here with a cockatrice' dead-killing eye
He rouseth up himself, and makes a pause;
While she, the picture of pure piety,
Like a white bird under the grype 's sharp claws,
Pleads, in a wilderness where are no laws,
To the rough beast that knows no gentle right,
Nor aught obeys but his foul appetite, (qtd. in Gibbs 48-9)
The italicized details show the striking tonal and verbal correspondence between
Shakespeare's and Yeats's lines. Tarquin's "dead-killing eye" and his "sharp
claws" call to mind the "gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" and the "lion body" of
the beast:
somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
This analysis sharpens the scaring connotations of the beast. Moreover, Shake
speare's evocation of a "wilderness where are no laws" recalls the state of "mere
anarchy" presented in "The Second Coming." In both cases, "pure pity" embodied
by Lucrece and "the ceremony of innocence" embodied by Marie Antoinette, are
wildly outraged. The tonal similarities between these two scenes are finally con
firmed by Shakespeare's analogy between Tarquin and the rough beast, a metaphor
verbally echoed in Yeats's poem:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

This series of thematic and semantic correspondences shows the strong poetic
influence exercised on Yeats's creative imagination by Shakespeare's portrait of
the "wilderness" and by the rough beast. Such correspondences, once again, reveal
the extreme inclusiveness of the symbol of the rough beast within which converge
Shakespearean, Burkean, Dantean, Christian and esoteric sources. This gives the
image the dignified literary status of a symbol which embodies the connotations of
the history of tradition. In this regard, in A Vision Yeats states that the antithetical
revelation is an intellectual influx bom from our spirit and history:
My instructors certainly expect neither a "primitive state" nor a
return to barbarism as primitivism and barbarism are ordinarily

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 332 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

understood; antithetical revelation is an intellectual influx nei

ther from beyond mankind nor born of a virgin, but begotten from
our spirit and history. (262)
The hypothesis of a complex network of literary interference within the poem
is finally corroborated by the discovery of the occurrence of Romantic echoes. In
1963, Jon Stallworthy suggested a semantic analogy between Shelley's "Ozy
mandias" and Yeats's beast (22-3):
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert [...] Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies. ("Ozymandias")
somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun
Is moving its slow thighs, ("The Second Coming")
In 1948 Donald Weeks had already indicated another Shelleyan source for the
poem. This influence of romantic tradition consists of the words of the Last Fury
of "Prometheus Unbound" who represents Jupiter, Shelley's Anti-Prometheus.
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.
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 the best things are thus confused to ill. (Works 2,198-99)
In "The Second Coming," Yeats describes the same disruption of the value
system of society:
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;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

In both cases the poets portray a picture of paradoxical transmutation between "the
best" and "the worst" emblematic of a state of anarchy and confusion ("Things fall
apart"; "And all the best things are thus confused to ill"). Yeats's choice of the terms
"best" and "worst" seems to be an echo of the Nietzschean register:

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Echoes of the Ancestors 333

When a civilisation ends, task having led to task until everybody

was bored, the whole turns bottom upwards, Nietzsche's "trans
valuation of all values." (Explorations 433)
Shelley, like Yeats, has "moral values that [are] not aesthetic values" (Autobi
ographies 313); moreover, he possesses "vast sentiments, generalizations sup
ported by tradition" (Letters 853). However, behind these ethical and semantic
analogies there lies disguised a discrepancy in the poets' attitudes towards the
coming disruption.
While Shelley fears the possible triumph of demonic forces, Yeats's reaction
to the shocking revelation of the beast is ambiguously exultant ("its hour come
round at last"). According to Yeats, Shelley
lacked the Vision of Evil, could not conceive of the world as a
continual conflict [...] was subject to an automatonism which he
mistook for poetical invention [...] and used it to evade hatred,
or rather to hide it. (A Vision 144)

Although both poets believe that order is an integral aspect of civilization, Yeats
welcomes disorder and war as means of regenerating the present condition. More
over, he foresees "some violent annunciation" as a sign of the approach of an
antithetical power (Variorum Edition 825). For this reason Yeats wonders: "Why
is Shelley terrified of the Last Day like a Victorian child?" (Essays 420). Unlike
Shelley, Yeats glorifies apocalypse as a moment of historical transmutation:

Love war because of its horror, that belief may be changed,

civilization renewed. We desire belief and lack it. Belief comes
from shock and is not desired. (Explorations 425-26)
In the poem "Ode to the West Wind," on the other hand, Shelley suggests that
the violence of the autumnal wind is a necessary step towards transformation. In
"Prometheus Unbound" the poet represents destruction as oppression, the tyrant is
overthrown and humankind liberated. Revolution is achieved by changing the
social structure and by activating a process of recreation from within. In conclusion,
while Shelley sees change as a form of individual and political progress, Yeats
considers change as historical alteration foretold by apocalyptic events; wars and
revolutions are the precursors to the revelation of his second coming.
According to Yeats, the moment of confrontation between contrasting forces
repeats itself within a cycle of eternal conflict between antinomies: justice and
reality, human and superhuman, Good and Evil:

Never will boundless time be emptied of that pair; and they

prevail in rum as that circle comes around, and pass away before
one another and increase in their appointed rum. (A Vision 67)

For this reason, Yeats believes in the poet's task of representing this metaphysical
conflict between antitheses and bringing the reader to an understanding of it. This

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 3 34 The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies

seems to be the reason why Dante occurs as one of the main sources of inspiration
of the poem. In fact, Yeats believed that Dante "was content to see both good and
evil" and therefore he "could conceive of the world as a continual conflict" (A
Vision 144). A further correspondence can then be seen between Dante's vision and
Blake's theory of art based on antinomies and his defense of it. In The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell Blake wrote that "Without contraries is no progression," to
emphasize that his metaphysical principle of opposites rules the cycle of life.
In conclusion, the confluence and interaction of literary and philosophical
traditions unveils Yeats's attempt to embrace and represent the timeless drama of
the antithetical conflict underlying the history of humankind. Although the histori
cal events of the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the atrocities of the Black
and Tans can easily justify the apocalyptic scenario depicted in "The Second
Coming," the literary echoes from the past broaden the political and historical
contextualization of the poem. According to this interpretation, the poem can be
read as an archetypal representation of the many historical moments of crisis and
regeneration which occur within an endless "deterministic" partem. Moreover, the
poet's eclectic assumption of Catholic, esoteric and literary sources portrays the
present idiosyncratic state of the mind, where "the centre cannot hold" and therefore
order and logic are disrupted. In the final version of the poem, the intricate network
of semantic and figurative echoes of the past converges to assume a new tonal
intensity. In the process of eradication from their original contexts and integration
in "The Second Coming," the sources apparently lose their specific ideological,
literary, and philosophical significance. Nevertheless, they retain their connotations
of crisis, wilderness and disruption while assuming a broader perspective within
the poem, which represents the archetypal conflict between antitheses. In the
meanwhile, the artistic fascination of the poem is enriched by the polyphonic
interaction of numerous echoes transmitting the experience of the past:
Yet we must hold to what we have that the next civilisation may
be bom, not from a virgin's womb, nor a tomb without a body,
not from a void, but of our own rich experience. (Explorations
437)
In the final version of "The Second Coming" the multiplicity of reverberations
transcends to convey a more universal perspective of the revelation. Moreover, in
the dramatic texture of the poem the polyphonic convergence of the voices of the
ancestors testifies to the cyclical conflict of the historical drama of humankind:

[I] discover that I have been describing everybody's snuggle,

and the gyres turn in my thoughts [...] Opposites are everywhere
face to face, dying each other's life, living each other's death.
(Explorations 429-30)

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 Echoes of the Ancestors 335

NOTES

1. "The Second Coming" was written in January 1919, first published in The Dial
in 1920, and included in the collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer in 1921.
2. The manuscript drafts of "The Second Coming," which I here reproduced
indented in italics and followed immediately by manuscript references, are pres
ently conserved in The National Library of Dublin. The drafts of the entire
collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer were published in 1994, edited by
Thomas Parkinson. This series of Cornell's publications of Yeats's manuscripts has
largely facilitated the difficult task of interpreting Yeats's handwriting.

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