The Second Coming

What interested me most about this poem was Yeats' different view of the second coming.

As we have discussed in class, in Christianity, the second coming is the return of Jesus to earth.

If you were type in the second coming in Google and look through the images that appear, you’d find that most of them have the same characteristics; such as the image of Jesus, light, angels, and so on. Basically, the typical meaning given to the second coming is that of salvation.

However, this poem compares the common interpretation of the second coming to Yeats' own perspective of it. Instead of salvation, there is hopelessness and destruction; Instead of a savior, there is a monster.

He has even gone as far as using the concept of water, normally an element which represents cleansing and carries a positive connotation; and transformed it into something negative. “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed” and “The ceremony of innocence is drowned”  convey despair and a pessimistic view.

Yeats leads us to think that what we believe the future will bring may not actually be what we expect. There is only a false hope of what we wish reality to be.

There are may characteristics of modernism, as talked in class, that can be found in the poem. First, there is the questioning of reality, or rather, a reality to be. Will the world end with our savior descending to earth to retrieve the good and punish the bad; or will it end with the arrival of a monster that brings whit it the destruction of all that we know. Which is the reality? Are either of them the true future reality?

Second, there is the obsession with language. Each word is specially picked, carrying with it a specific meaning. It is no coincidence that so many of the words or phrases can relate to Christianity and the bible.

Finally, so as to bring this to an end (there is still much that can be discussed about the poem), what I find most intriguing about this and all the poems read is the shock factor. Never does the class immediately understand what the poet is trying to convey. There is either an initial state of confusion, misunderstanding, rejection, surprise, or as I just said, shock. I think this is because of not only the modernists stance on questioning all, but also their judgmental attitude towards the norm. What surprises me most though, are how these poems are still able to evoke some of the same reactions from the time in which they were written to our day in age.