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Answered: ‘Crow’s Fall’ by Ted Hughes Master Answer

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 04:27:41 +0000

Ted Hughes's poetic career commenced its flourishing with the publication of The Hawk in the Rain. His second volume, Lupercal, was published in 1960, and Hughes positioned himself among the eminent modern poets of the 1960s. His two volumes established him as a significant and innovative young poet of the 1960s. His subsequent volume, Wodwo, was initially published in 1967. It was regarded as heralding the Crow theme. In Crow's fall, Hughes draws more than one mythic references. It depicts central episode in the Winnebago Prickster cycle which concentrates on egocentrism, and the Christian concept of pride (the original sin). Hughes's Crow's fall draws upon two Hellenic myths. In the first myth, during the war against the giants, Apollo transforms himself into a white crow; and in the second myth Apollo becomes angry at the bird and transformed it into a Crow was the favourite bird of Apollo.

"But the sun brightened - It brightened, and crow returned charred

black He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black Up

there' he managed, Where white is black and black is white. I

won" (Crow, P. 36)

  The Crow is forbidden to fly longer with the other birds in ‘Crow and the Birds’. His egocentric nature is shattered. He is refusing to accept his own limits as he challenges the sun : a force far superior to a white crow. There is a clash between crow and other birds. While other birds are singing and flying in joy, crow is found "Straddled head - down in the beach - garbage, guzzling a dropped ice cream". (Crow, P. 37)

  The fall of the crows can also be observed in the poem ‘Crow Sickened’. Crow is trying to separate himself by destroying himself. He diveds, he journeys, challenges, and climbs with a glare, but he finally met fear. He shuts his eyes sealed up with shock refusing to see. With his great strength he strikes. He tries his best level, and falls horrified. The poem deals with how crow struggles against the adverse situation. His appears to be the Winnebago Trickster.

  Hughes writes not only on the Crow's adventure only but also on Crows psychic adventure and journey of Crow. 'Oedipus Crow' and 'Song for a Phallus' are two poems which illustrate best the Oedipus myth. 'Song for a Phallus' is a savegely rendering of the Oedipus story.

  Crow is a series of sufferings and spiritual adventures Crow passes through initiations, encounters highly personalities and monsters. Crow is present at the creation of world and he will be there at the end of world. His life and songs display the history of world, going through Trickster cycle.

  Ted Hughes's ‘Crow’s Fall’ is a vivid example of modern poetry, reflecting the complexities of the modernist and postmodernist movements through its innovative use of form, language, and themes. Ted Hughes, a prolific port has combined various ancient myths and legends and formed a distinguished philosophical framework of his own.

  The composition employs free verse, a hallmark of contemporary poetry, consisting of 17 lines of disparate lengths and an erratic metrical arrangement that combines trochaic feet and spondees. Literary devices are utilised minimally, with anaphora evident in lines 3–8 to enhance flow. The poem employs a straightforward style, eschewing elaborate language.

  He has amalgamated myths of some very ancient traditions, myths and tales of the Eskimos, the Japanese, the North-American Indian tribes, the Persians, and the lore of the Talmud and the Koran. Through. this poetry collection, Hughes ridicules and satirizes the omnipotent God, or the creator of this universe. The poet has the falsehood of man's biased beliefs. According to Ekbert Faas, an American critic in these poems, the protagonist (who is a bird) shares the stage with the Biblical creator, the serpent, and Adam and Eve and he encounters such famous mythological personages as Proteus, Ulysses, Hercules, and Beowulf.

  At the outset of the poem, the poet depicts not an ordinary but a mythological crow of white feathers representing innocence and purity. One day crow thought that the sun was blazing brighter than him. The Frustrated crow challenged the sun in a battle of luminosity and lustre. Sun is signified here as Almighty or the Super power of the creation. Just as Satan challenged against God's Throne, crow, the symbol of satanic spirit defied the limits and tried to be as omnipotent as the sun. The egoist crow was full of resolution that he could defeat the sun.

"He got his strength up flush and in full glitter

  He clawed and fluffed his rage up"

  Hughes, through his brilliant use of slant humor and bitter irony exaggerated this section in a hyperbolic manner. His inner arrogance had turned him ignorant of the fact that the sun could not be eclipsed. In Hughes humorous vision, the sun seemed smaller than the crow the egoist of all egoists, hard-core solipsist, selfish.

  The Crow is lost in the dead pool of arrogance. He is aware of his hypocrite extravaganza. He gets overwhelmed by the upsurge of high-vaulting ambition. Aiming his beak towards the sun's dazzling centre, he cawed his battle cry

"He aimed his beak direct at the sun's centre

  He laughed himself to the centre of himself and attacked".

   At the fag-end of the poem, the poet upholds the aftermath of Icarus. Again, the sun shinned but the crow lost his incident myth transgressing one's limit vibrant splendour.

"But the sun brightened-

  It brightened, and crow returned charred black"

   "He opened his mouth but what came out was charted

His blind, inscrutable ambition burnt his colour. But his arrogance knew no bound. Finally the crow asserted "where white is black and black is white. I won". (Chiasmus)

  In deeper perspective, the ‘Crow' is nothing but the external manifestation of our sub-conscious arrogant self. That ‘self' always tries to overpower others; wants to rule the whole world, doesn't acknowledge the obedience or subjugation. Even being failed, that Self tries to pro proclaim the victory. In Freudian term this is called ‘Ego’. In Hughes’ diabolic interpretation, this can be analysed as the of human being's exuberance of arrogance.

  The Crow's choice to assault the sun, an ostensibly omnipotent entity, illustrates the theme of hubris. This parallels literary works that examine the repercussions of transgressing or defying the divine or natural order, such as Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" or the myth of Prometheus in Greek mythology.

Answered: ODE TO AUTUMN CRITICAL APPRECIATION

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 16:11:05 +0000

In Ode to Autumn Keats appears before us more as an artist than as a worshipper of nature. A lover of sensuous beauty, Keats has painted the season of Autumn in minute details which are not only faithful but also charming. All significant sights and sounds of Autumn are brought alive to us in a memorable manner with lovely imagery.

The external aspect of the things described is vividly realistic, but what lends an additional charm to the photographic vividness is the inner vision of the poet. The fruit of autumn like apples and hazels are ripe to the very core of them, and the secret is the sweet conspiracy between Autumn and the friendly Sun. Autumn produces many 'later flowers' after the summer's abundant contribution in this sphere. But Keats, not content to talk about the colour and fragrance of flowers, focuses on their relation with the bees. Exploring the psychology of the tired bees, who wonder why summer is continuing, he creates a fine fusion between the human and the natural worlds. The picture is not yet complete. The cells of the bee-hives have already become clammy, overflowing with honey gathered during summer. It is a literally sweet problem for the bees.

The whole picture of Autumn in the English rural setting is both realistic and beautified with mythical imagination. The harvester is presented as sitting on the granary floor, having no anxiety in his mind for his grains, and a lock of hair dangling on his forehead is being moved gently by the 'winnowing wind'. The pictures of the reaper in the half-reaped furrow', drowsed with the sweet smell of poppy flowers; of the gleaner balancing his corn-loaded form while crossing a brook; and of the patient cider-presser watching the 'last oozings hours by hours'all are vivid and life-like, and have a unique emotional and artistic appeal.

The way in which Keats describes the sky and the landscape at the time of autumnal sun-set is truly poetic. Amidst the 'barred clouds' the red sun looks like a blooming flower, and the roots of the corn after harvest gives the 'stubble plains a masculine look. It also creates a suitable background for the music of gnats which, otherwise, would not appeal to the listeners. Thus Ode to Autumn is a rare specimen of picture-painting in English poetry.

Critics generally agree that 'Ode to Autumn' is the most satisfying and mature of Keatsean odes. It is also the most artistically 'impersonal' of them, and certainly felicitous in diction and musical cadence. From its opening phrases to the closing ones, matter and manner have not only been superbly blended, but every line bears the authentic stamp of Keatsean poetry at its best.

The first stanza is the symphony of colour, the second, the symphony of movement; and the third, the symphony of sound. It is, altogether, as rich in details, as in pattern. C. H. Herford truly says, "The season of mellow fruitfulness wakens no romantic vision, no romantic longing like the nightingale's song. It satisfies all the senses, but enthrals and intoxicates none. Everything breathes contented fulfilment without satiety, and beauty too is fulfilled and complete."

Keats focuses on the richness, plenitude, and peaceful joy of Autumn. Phrases like 'mellow fruitfulness', 'load and bless with fruits', 'ripeness to the core', have an enormous sensuous impact. The climax in this respect is reached with the "O'er brimmed clammy cells" of the bee-hives. But there is something more than naive celebration of plenitude: the very first line refers to 'mists', and soon the bees fondly think 'warm days will never cease'. These are hints of awareness of the coming winter.

The mythical presentation of Autumn through human figures of the farmer, the reaper, the gleaner, and the cider-presser, betrays romantic imagination of the highest order. The imagery is sensuously rich, and emotionally satisfying. The subtle combination of visual beauty and the feeling of compassion fused with a plea for indolence, is remarkable in the lines on the reaper:

'Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers.'

The final stanza begins with the crucial question, "Where are the songs of spring? Aye, where are they?" This nice dramatic interpolation adds a note of variety to the lyric; and immediately answering to his own question the poet rolls out the special music-sheet of Autumn. The musical mood is facilitated by the appropriate setting and moment. The 'wailful choir' of gnats becomes interesting being 'borne aloft or sinking as the light wind lives or dies'. The bleating of the lamb becomes richer in effect being echoed by surrounding hills. Moreover, the effect is compactly tactile-visual, as in the lines-

'While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue.'

The ethereal and the earthly, the delicate and the stubborn, the moist and the warm, the blooming and the dying, are imaginatively fused together in such imagery. While it is a superb evidence of Keats's romantic appreciation of nature, it also exemplifies his power to correlate nature and humanity. Truly, 'Ode to Autumn' is a masterpiece of Romantic poetry.

After glorifying Autumn's gifts and celebrating her plenitude in the first two stanzas of Ode to Autunn, Keats himself raises the question at the beginning of the final stanza. He seems to anticipate such a critical query because compared to spring and summer, Autumn is bound to be criticized as unmusical. It is true that great singing birds like the cuckoo and the nightingale are not heard in Autumn. But Keats is not ready to admit that Autumn has no music. In fact, Keats declared so beautifully in the sonnet 'On the Grasshopper and the Cricket', that "The poetry of earth is never dead'. So, in answer to the taunting question 'Aye, where are they?' he cites a brilliant list of autumnal music, discovered and aptly presented by himself. But he is realistic enough to admit the absence of vernal music: "Think not of them."

Like a researcher he establishes, what nobody knew before, that the monotonous droning of gnats can be musical, presented in the setting of the sunset, among the riverside willows, and, being made alternately high and low in volume 'as the light wind lives or dies'. Keats proves himself as an expert in acoustics as he finds the lamb's bleating all the more fascinating for being echoed on the hills surrounding the valley. The robin red-breast is a homely singer throughout the year, but the poet boldly claims that in Autumn its whistle becomes 'treble soft'. And he rounds off the list of Autumn's songs with the twittering swallows as they fly in the sky.

Such a pleading for Autumn betrays Keats's immense love for the season, whom he does not want to be defeated on any score.

Answered: SONNET 73 MASTER ANSWER

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 15:33:29 +0000

Shakespeare’s sonnets appeared in Quarto form in 1609 when it was published by Thomas Thorpe. It announced the sonnets to be “Never before imprinted” although sonnets 138 and 144 had been published previously in The Passionate Pilgrim. Sonnet 73 is written according to the English Shakespearean type including three quatrains and a couplet.

Sonnet 73 is structurally formatted into three quatrains rhymed a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-ef and a couplet rhymed g-g following the quatrains. As discussed in the Introduction, the Shakespearean sonnet takes its stylistic format from the Earl of Surrey’s variations introduced to the Italian form of the sonnet divided into an Octave and a Sestet.

The first quatrain of the sonnet 73 gives a clear picture of the season of autumn- as the symbol of old age. The second quatrain, describes the twilight after sunset, which is swallowed up by the night. This again is symbolic of the approach of death. The third image is that of a fire that is almost dead, a brilliant conceit worked out to act as a symbol of death being fed by life. The picture of the tree in Autumn is one that suggests the feelings of old age

“when yellow leaves, or none, or few”

reminds of the image of tiredness in Macbeth :

“My way of life is fallen into the sere, the yellow leaf’

Here the leaves are yellow on some boughs , ready to fall, on some branches there are no leaves at all as have fallen, and on some others boughs they are few- almost none as the last few are just hanging desperately and about to fall. There is nothing uncertain or ambiguous in this symbol of old age. The bleakness is emphasised in the next picture that the branches are shaking “against the cold”. The trembling of a leaf in a cold wind, the shivering of a skeleton-like old man are always used conventionally to suggest the wintry threshold of death. The idea is strengthened by the further image of the

“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”

The tree was once full of green leaves in whose clusters rushed the nest of singing birds Now that the leaves are gone, the nest have also gone, the birds had gone and the music has also gone. There is nothing but barrenness, bereft of the music of youth as old age is Of everything valued in youth! This leads to the development of the idea further in the second quatrain.

In the second quatrain, the image of the evening of the sun who has just set but struggles on with the approaching darkness is very vivid. In the twilight after sunset darkness grapples with light. The twilight fades and night “Death second self’ comes and seals up everything. The (corpse of the) light is carried among by black night. Here the twilight is not indicative of hope as dawn could be, but only a step in the direction of dark death. The death of the sun, and the death of the light. The idea of the sun as youth is quite common in Shakespeare earlier sonnets.

The third quatrain suggests most brilliantly in a fully- developed conceit the dying warmth of the ashes of old age. Here, the old age is placed concretely before our eyes- just as warm ashes of dead youth. The conceit is magnificently conceived. Youth burns with great energy. As fire burns stronger it consumes the wood quicker. The fiercer the fire, the greater the burning and the quicker the end ! Similarly the more fierce the youth, the greater in its propensity to burn itself out. Youth is a self-consuming fire- the greater the passionate activity of youth, the quicker does it burn itself out. The fire is the death-bed of life-dying fire which keeps the ashes first warm. Every moment the warmth is vanishing- as old age is slipping towards death.

As Schroeter has remarked, the " crux third quatrain, " a complex analogy W.H death of the fire to the life and death of man." Schroeter discusses the fire as if it were any blaze in a hearth, but the fire becomes more meaningful if viewed as a particular sort of fire, one which is linked with the seasonal and tree imagery of the first quatrain.

The three quatrains succeed, in the three images of the autumn tree, the dying twilight and the dead fire- in creating a sense of gloom, the shadow of death spread on them. The doom is felt clearly and there is no saving grace. The last two lines or the couplet, times to mitigate the impression of doom but fails. It appears very tame and inadequate. The young man realises that this friend the poet has become old and will soon die, so he loves him more as he will lose him in the immediate future.

Scholars and poets have been delighted to discover that the poem is also beautifully constructed, chiefly in the use of quatrains that deal with increasingly briefer periods of time: autumn, as a time of year, is followed by twilight, a time of day, and the glowing of a fire shortly to disappear. The ashes of the speaker’s youth are likened to a deathbed into the context of the whole, we perceive that it comes close to the centre, just after a group of very gloomy musings. Though the topic of impending death continues, the tone changes drastically, ending on a positive note. As we have often seen—and heard, the speaker becomes more forceful in the final couplet: here, the friend is addressed in a series of thick-clustered consonants, and three of the first four syllables are emphatically stressed. The key word strong anchors the rest of the line. The bond between speaker and addressee that had been seriously weakened just prior to this is now reaffirmed. One more surprise occurs in the last line. The speaker does not talk about his own leaving, but switches to his friend’s departure. This has at least two different effects: it suggests a sweet self-effacement of the speaker in thinking primarily of his friend’s faithfulness.

True to the way Shakespeare often includes socio-political events and discussions within philosophical musings, the image of bare boughs, bereft of birds appear like ‘bare ruined choirs’ to the poet, suggesting absence and triggering recollection of chancels and abbeys left empty and desolate after Henry VIII’s dissolution of monasteries. Of course, the immediate aim is to describe how every scene of fullness and beauty is subject to change and transformation. In the next four lines, the poet explores another analogy, describing himself in terms of ‘twilight’, the time of day just before night falls. He personifies night as one who takes away sunlight just as time takes away the poet’s life and the youth’s beauty. ‘Death’s second self’ refers to sleep, as well as night which seals up or ‘sews up’ the day. Sleep is pictured as the shadow of death, bringing relief, but not snuffing out life altogether. Thus, the poet alludes to the possibility of impending death but stops short of suggesting complete cessation of life. Shakespeare moves on to the next connected image of a fire that is rendered ash, and compares himself to the glowing embers of a dying fire, suggesting that just as a fire is consumed by the very substance that nourishes it, his life too is spent and consumed by the passage of time that was essential for its growth. Thus death is implicit in the process of life itself. The poet hopes that his images shall make the young man realise the fragility of life, beauty and existence and spur him to cherish the temporal but intense love the poet has for him.

“What is rooted in time, time itself destroys."

As Traversi points out, Shakespeare's awareness of time's destructiveness frequently caused him to recoil from love and friend- ship as corrupting and repellent in their necessary transience.

Answered: THE SUN RISING - JOHN DONNE MASTER ANSWER

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 15:13:18 +0000

According to Grierson there are three distinctive strains in Donne's love poetry : 1.Cynical 2. Platonic and 3. Conjugal. The first is found in such lyrics as ‘Women's Constancy’, ‘The Indifferent’, ‘Air and Angels’, ‘The Dreame’ and ‘The Apparition’. The Platonic strain is present in poems like ‘Twicknam Garden’, ‘The Funerall’, ‘The Blossome’, ‘The Primrose’, etc. The third, conjugal love which is less artificial than the second and purer than the first is expressed in the poems addressed to his wife, Ann More. These are ‘The Anniversary’, ‘The Dreame’, ‘The Sun Rising’, ‘The Canonization’, ‘The Break of Day’, ‘The Expiration’, etc.

‘The Sun Rising’ is a witty and amusing poem. It is light verse, but it is also extremely serious. It is, in fact, a good example of the fact that seriousness is different from solemnity and may be accompanied with a good deal of frivolity. This poem also illustrates Donne's revolt against the artificiality and absurdity of the fashionable love poetry of courtly chivalry in which the conceit of the beloved's eyes being regarded as brighter than the sun had long become a tedious formula. Donne laughs at the hyperboles or the fantastic exaggerations of the courtly poetry by pretending to accept- them. Its final objective is to express the poet's feeling of happiness and completeness in the possession of his mistress. She is so all-perfect, all-lovely, all-complete that she, and she alone, justifies the fantastic hyperboles of courtly poetry.

The poet treats the sun familiarly, colloquially, and irreverently. It is one of the paradoxes of the poem that the poet uses the adjective "unruly' for the sun when the sun is really the standard of order, regulation, and law.

      "Busy old fool, unruly sun, Why dost thou thus,

       Through windows, and through curtains call on us?"

The poem begins with a rhetorical arrogant address to the sun. Like many of Donne's poems, this one begins abruptly, with a sharp, surprising colloquial exclamation: 'Busy old fool, unruly Sun.The poet expresses his contempt for the sun by addressing it as "saucy pedantic wretch". The reason for this is that the poet, in his joy at his complete possession of his mistress, feels that he possesses, rules, and controls the whole world, and therefore is superior to the sun itself.

The lovers are indifferent to the rising of the sun because they can go on making love even after the sun n even after the sun has arisen. The lover, further, claims that he can eclipse and darken the sun merely I wink. The lover has only to close his eyes, and the sunlight exists no more for him and the beloved's eyes are so bright that their light can dazzle the sun.

   "I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,

    But that I would not lose her sight so long:"

Usually one is dazzled by the sun's brightness, but here is the reversal of the situation. In the second stanza the poet continues his boastful tone. The lover asks the sun to go and find out whether the East Indies and the West are still situated at their original location or they have moved from there to lie with him in his bed.

   "Whether both the" India's of spice and mine

    Be where thou lefi'st them, or lie here with me.

    Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,

    And thou shalt here, All here in one bed lay."

The idea is that the beloved who lies in the bed is a combination of both the east and the West Indies. The East Indies were known for their fragrant spices, and the West Indies for their diamond mines. The mistress sums up in herself all the riches and perfumes of the East and the West. She is the glory of the whole world. Also, the setting of the scene, only implied in the first stanza, is now made more specific.

  She is the whole world and he the supreme ruler of the world. Here is an extravagant conceit, indeed. His tone in speaking to the sun now softens instead of harsh. Let the sun warm the lovers and it will truly be warming the whole world because the lovers are a microcosm of the world. The poet claims that, with a wink of his eyes, he can eclipse and cloud the sun. The beloved who lies in the bed with him is a combination of both the Indies; of spice and mine. She thus represents both the East and the West Indies because of her sweet fragrance and her glitter. As for himself he represents all the kings of the world. The beloved is all the kingdoms of the world, and the poet is all the monarch of the world. If the sun shines on the lover’s bed-room only, and does not travel to other places, it will still be warming the whole world because their bed-room is a microcosm of the whole world. These are all far fetched and fantastic ideas.

The poet and his mistress symbolise the whole world and all its rulers. Those who claim to be the rulers of the world are in fact, merely imitating the lovers. Likewise all honour in the world is a shadow of the true honour which belongs to these lovers, Donne’s tone is colloquial and deliberately irreverential. Words and phrases like motions, India's of spice and mine, all states, alchemy, thy centre, thy sphere have been taken from astronomy and politics. Not only they connect the audience with contemporary scientific attitudes, they give a new orientation to poetic activity. The use of hyperbolic expressions is quite abundant.

The dramatic element in his poems is most immediately apparent in the opening lines. For instance, in The Anniversary, two real characters speak to each other - 'thou and I'. There is no rhetoric and the tone, rhythm and words are of the living speech. Petrarch addressed the sun as 'live giving sun' but Donne adopts the attitude of haughty defiance to the sun in The Sunne Rising. For him the sun is 'Busie old foole untruly sun'.

Samuel Johnson, the 18th C English critic, 'characterised metaphysical poetry as "heterogeneous ideas yoked by violence together-nature and a n are ransacked for illustrations ,comparisons and illusions." Metaphysical Poetry is full of conceits or far-fetched imagery. There are three modes of conceits in this poem - the dialectic, the rhetoric and the witty modes. The dialectic conceit helps to establish the truth (here the superiority of Love), the rhetoric aims at persuasion (persuading the sun at the end to give up its cumbersome labour to journey through the world and instead just shine on the two of them) and the witty mode seeks to blend apparently disparate experiences (where the sun with its astronomical antiquity is equated with human old age and thereby reduced to a subservient role in the context of the man-centred universe).

Answered: THE SECOND COMING BY WB YEATS – CRITICAL ANALYSIS

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 08:30:04 +0000

One of the most famous poems in the English language, “The Second Coming” is the definitive vision of the Yeatsian apocalypse. It incorporates and intensifies ideas of cyclic creation and destruction already articulated in poems like “The Magi,” “On Woman,” “The Phases of the Moon,” and “Solomon and the Witch,” and more obliquely anticipated by “Easter 1916” (“All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born”). In its unsettling concatenation of images and startling revision of Christian doctrine, the poem finds the sufficient formula for genuine mythmaking and in this respect goes beyond a poem like “The Phases of the Moon,” which, as Yeats admits, has the abstract quality of a “text for exposition”

The underlying “mathematical figure” of “The Second Coming,” as Yeats states in a lengthy note to the poem, is the cone or gyre interlocked with its opposite, the vertex of the one centered upon the base of the other. This figure defines the relation not only between subjective and objective impulses within the individual, but also within the pattern of history. The end of an age, Yeats explains, “always receives the revelation of the character of the next age” and “is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction. At the present moment the life gyre [i.e., the objective or primary impulse] is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ which was narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest expansion. The revelation which approaches will however take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre [i.e., the subjective or antithetical impulse].

In its first stanza, “The Second Coming” envisions just this “expansion” of the “life gyre” in the figure of the falcon circling in a widening gyre beyond the command of the falconer, an image that Yeats had rehearsed in the fine minor poem “The Hawk” (1916). The image reverses the beatific downward gyre of the white gull in “Demon and Beast,” such that the two poems in conjunction embody the double movement of the gyres as each dies into the life of the other. The image also reprises the central image of the “The Wild Swans at Coole,” the private bereavement of the earlier poem writ large as a symbol of universal dissolution, of anarchy “loosed upon the world,” of the “blood-dimmed tide” drowning everywhere “the ceremony of innocence.” This is something like the ceremony of innocence that Yeats wishes for his daughter in “A Prayer for My Daughter,” which immediately follows in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) and in the collected poems.

The second stanza, echoing the desert scene in the final stanza of “Demon and Beast,” stages the vision of destruction by which modernity is to be undone. Convinced that the “second com- ing” must be at hand, for the condition of the culture is unsustainable, Yeats sees “a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi,” or the “world spirit,” a version of the AniMA MunDi that is a central concept in Yeats’s esoteric philosophy. in his notes to Lady gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920), Yeats attributes the concept of the “spiritus mundi” to the Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–87) and describes it as a pervasive vital spirit that contains “all forms, so that the parents when a child is begotten, or a witch when the double is projected as a hare, but as it were, call upon the Spiritus Mundi for the form they need” . in a note to “an image from a past life,” Yeats describes the Spiritus Mundi as a “general storehouse of images which have ceased to be a property of any personality or spirit” . in this case, the mind’s eye calls forth from the Spiritus Mundi a desert scene in which 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 above “reel shadows of the indignant desert birds,” as if the noble, solitary falcon of the opening stanza has been reborn as its anti-self.

The image of the sphinx had germinated for decades, inspired perhaps, as Harold Bloom and stallworthy think, by shelley’s “ozymandias,” with its related vision: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk a shattered visage lies . . .” (Yeats 319; Between the Lines 22 – 23). in Autobiographies, Yeats recalls an occult experiment that took place in 1890 or 1891 in which macgregor mathers induced a vision clearly anticipatory of the sphinx of “The second Coming.” Yeats saw “a desert and a black Titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap of ancient ruins”.

In its chilling final lines, “The second Coming” crossbreeds its dark cyclic vision with the tra- ditional Christian mythos of the second coming (see Matthew 24) and revelation (see Revelation 13). Like some mutant Christ, the rough beast, “its hour come round at last,” slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, not in initiation of a final heavenly peace, but in perpetuation of the violent revolutions of history and in annunciation of the birth of a new age, as in “The Magi” (“round” in this case has a literal signification). as Richard Ellmann writes, “The final intimation that the new god will be born in Bethlehem, which Christianity associates with passive infancy and the tenderness of maternal love, makes it brutishness particularly frightful” .