Read the Poem 'The Second Coming

Question

Read the Poem 'The Second Coming' by W. B Yeats thoroughly and answer the questions that follow:

'The Second Coming'

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

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.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: 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, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

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 born?

Respond to the questions given below:

Q1. What is the tone of this poem and what literary devices does the poet use? (2)

Q2. What characteristics does this poem have that show that it is from the modern era? (3)

Q3. “The Modern Era ushered in a time of radical change with new thoughts, doubts and sensibilities emerging”. Explain this sentence further with reference to modernism, post colonialism and post modernism. (5) 

(Word Limit for Q1 & Q2: 100-150 words)

(Word Limit for Q3: 250 words)

Answer 1

Poetic devices include the following:

epithet: “blood-dimmed tide”

antithesis (juxtaposition of opposites): “The best lack all conviction...”

simile: “ A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun”

synecdoche: “Is moving its slow thighs”

repetition: “Turning and turning ... the falcon cannot hear the falconer”

allusion: “Spiritus Mundi,” “Slouches toward Bethlehem”

alliteration: “The darkness drops ... stony sleep”

Clues to the poem’s modernity include a tone of cynicism and pessimism; the poet re-imagines the second coming as a horror descending on the world, with our Savior taking the form of a “rough beast.” The poem has no set form, more characteristic of modern poetry.

Written in the immediate aftermath of WWI, the Easter Uprising, and the Spanish Flu pandemic, the modern sensibility on display here is one of hopelessness, resignation to man’s apocalyptic downfall.