What Rough Beast? Yeats,
Nietzsche and Historical Rhetoric in “The Second Coming”
John R.
Harrison
In the absence of a thorough
examination of the impact on "The Second Coming" of Yeats's historical thought,
it is arguable that the meaning the poet intended has not only been consistently
overlooked, but that in general the poem has been taken to mean the opposite of
what he intended. This essay offers a reassessment of the thought and imagery,
of the response Yeats wished to evoke, and of the antithetical rhetoric of his
dialectical view of history.
The text provides a striking example of the
synthetic technique which produced some of Yeats's finest poems, one which
condenses into imagery as much of the poet's thought as is possible but which
also creates interpretative problems of which he was fully aware and which he
attributed to the compressed, logical rigor of the ideas: "It is hard for a
writer, who has spent much labor upon his style, to remember that thought, which
seems to him natural and logical like that style, may be unintelligible to
others" (Variorum 853). However, Yeats did not believe his philosophy to be
either obscure or idiosyncratic; in fact he found confirmation of it in the work
of Boehme, Heraclitus, Jung, Nietzsche, Spengler, and Vico and in Neoplatonism
and the Upanishads. More surprisingly, he considered the intellectual equivalent
of his own imaginative richness of suggestion to be the "packed logic," the
"difficult scornful lucidity," of Alfred North Whitehead, Professor of Applied
Mathematics at Imperial College, London, and subsequently of Philosophy at
Harvard, and Bertrand Russell's collaborator on the Principia Mathematica
(Letters 714). Russell's "plebeian loquacity" infuriated Yeats who admired
"something aristocratic" in Whitehead's mind, a combination of terse clarity and
suggestive complexity in thought and expression which he labored assiduously to
attain, nowhere more so than in this poem.
Yeats wrote "The Second
Coming" at the time he was collecting, from his wife's automatic writing, the
material from which he created the philosophical system later set out in A
Vision, the "very profound, very exciting mystical philosophy" which was to
change radically the nature of his verse, and make him feel that for the first
time he understood human life: "I live with a strange sense of revelation . . .
. You will be astonished at the change in my work, at its intricate passion"
(Letters 643-44). In reality this philosophy was neither completely new nor
entirely mystical in origin, but rather a crystallization of what Yeats had
read, thought, experienced and written over many years, the result of the
process whereby he had "pieced [his] thoughts into philosophy" ("Nineteen
Hundred and Nineteen," Variorum 429). Despite Yeats's own conviction that this
had produced a striking change in his writing, many critics have demurred. There
has often been a reluctance to take Yeats's thinking seriously and, partly as a
consequence of this, a refusal to accept that he successfully expressed his
beliefs in his poetry, especially a skepticism regarding what Graham Martin has
called his "cryptic symbolism" (230). In fact the symbolism in "The Second
Coming" is anything but cryptic, except in the limited sense that it embodies
some of the most profound elements of his philosophy in a concentrated and
complex form which he recognized might prove not immediately intelligible to the
reader, but which is entirely logical and consistent. Moreover, it mines a deep
and rich vein--literary, philosophical, historical, political and
mythical--which has little, if anything, to do with the occult.
The most
fundamental question which has to be addressed in any interpretation of the poem
concerns the response Yeats invites to the sphinx symbol, which is awesome,
frightening, at last seemingly repulsive, yet which I shall contend
paradoxically embodies much to which he was intellectually and emotionally
committed. Critical opinion has predominantly interpreted the rough beast as a
comfortless vision of horror, symbolizing the birth of a "violent, bestial
anti-civilization" (Unterecker 165), while often suggesting that the poem as a
whole consists of generalizations which do not require, or would not benefit
from, detailed analysis.[4] Two recent commentaries have underlined the need for
a critical reassessment by reiterating such views. In the first Thomas Kinsella
asserts that the rough beast is related, visually and verbally, to the imagery
and the "brutal diction" of "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen." The passage he
quotes refers to atrocities committed by the Black and Tans at Gort in County
Galway:
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;
The night can sweat with terror. (Variorum 429)
In fact there is only a superficial resemblance between these lines and the imagery and "brutal diction" associated with the rough beast of "The Second Coming," in which the contemporary Irish context is inseparable from the wider context of Yeats's intellectual, social and historical perspectives. In the second, Nicholas Drake states that "the rhetorical phrases, repetitions . . . and metaphors are generalizations lacking any specific context" (52-54). On the contrary, this poem is a compelling example of the movement in Yeats's verse towards the concrete and particular, and the perspectives referred to above provide for the language and imagery the specific context which Drake denies exists.
Those critics who have attempted to provide such a context have not pursued the implications of the imager)' with the rigor and fearlessness Yeats demanded of himself, which ultimately took him "Ravening, raging and uprooting . . . / Into the desolation of reality" ("Supernatural Songs," Variorum 563).[2] To explore these implications fully one needs clearly to identify, and make intelligible, the "natural and logical" thought process incorporated in the language and imagery, and to explore the poem's "imaginative richness of suggestion," what may aptly be called its "difficult scornful lucidity."
Yeats's thought is here compressed into images with an intensity rare even in his work and with a deliberately provocative Nietzschean element of paradox. Yeats's interest in Nietzsche was aroused at least as early as September 1902, when his American lawyer friend, John Quinn, sent him his own copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra together with copies of The Case of Wagner and A Genealogy of Morals. The first mention in Yeats's letters is dated by Wade 26 September 1902. He wrote to Lady Gregory: "You have a rival in Nietzsche, that strong enchanter . . . . Nietzsche completes Blake and has the same roots—I have not read anything with so much excitement since I got to love Morris's stories which have the same curious astringent joy" (Letters 379). It was shortly after this, and not I believe coincidentally, that he began to reconstruct his poetic style to give it more "masculinity," more "salt," and to make it more idiomatic. Yeats also annotated John Quinn's copy of Thomas Common's Nietzsche as Critic, Philosopher, Poet and Prophet, which appeared in 1901. Most of his annotations are on passages from A Genealogy of Morals, Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spake Zarathustra. According to Professor Donald Torchiana Yeats's library contained at least the following texts (the dates of English translations are given in brackets): The Case of Wagner (1895), A Genealogy of Morals (1899), The Dawn of Day (1903), The Birth of Tragedy (1909), Thoughts out of Season (1909), and The Will to Power (190910). He also possessed Daniel Halevy's Life, translated by his own biographer, J. M. Hone. Professor Torchiana's inspection of the library was hurried and by no means thorough and he acknowledged that there may have been other works by Nietzsche (Thatcher 143). With such a consuming and lasting interest in Nietzsche's work, and considering that he possessed three texts published between 1909 and 1910, it is unlikely that Yeats was not acquainted with Nietzsche's last work to appear, Ecce Homo, first published in German in 1908 and in English in 1911.[3] In the course of this discussion of "The Second Coming" I shall point to some remarkable resonances between the work of these two writers in both language and meaning, while the critical emphasis will of course be on Yeats, not Nietzsche. Moreover, the question of literary influence is far too complex to be addressed here, and I am not in any way suggesting that either Yeats's language or meaning is directly derived from his reading of Nietzsche.
From the outset the poet invites, indeed demands, reference to his philosophic system, the central symbol of which contains two interpenetrating gyres or cones, perpetually in conflict and alternately victorious.[4] Whatever mystical origins Yeats may have claimed for this idea, it is a recognizably dialectical, and not necessarily an occult, concept. Despite the importance of this symbolism in Yeats's thought, it is rarely introduced into his poetry as explicitly as it is here; its use is thus a direct pointer to what he intended to be the poem's specific philosophical and historical context: <!--pagebreak-->Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer,
("The Second Coming" lines 1-2)
And throughout the poem bird imagery contributes to a coherent pattern, though not explicitly. In Jon Stallworthy's view the confusion which has surrounded the falcon image is dispelled once we realize that it was originally "hawk," but other connotations suggest that Yeats made the substitution precisely to avoid any association with "a gloomy bird of prey" (Stallworthy 18). Yeats adapted the dramatic description of the eagle that "stares on the sun by natural right" from Chaucer's Parlement of Foules:
Ther mighte men the royal egle finde,
That with his sharpe look perceth the sonne. (330-31)
In the next few lines Chaucer describes the goshawk as "the tyraunt with his fethres donne / And greye" (a distinctly" gloomy bird of prey") while the falcon is "the gentil faucon, that with his feet distreyneth / the Kinges hond." The "falcon-gentle," Middle English "faucon gentil," is the female or young of the goshawk, while in modern falconry the word "falcon" tends to be used only of the female of the species. This does not necessarily make her any less predatory in reality but Yeats would have been familiar with these nuances. The "brazen hawks" of "Meditations in Time of Civil War" are of an entirely different species. There are several falcon echoes throughout the poem but the opening lines have undertones which are typical of Yeats's thought and poetry. The peregrine falcon was the most popular of the birds of prey when falconry was the sport of kings, its fierce alertness and lofty bearing earning its reputation as a bird of nobility. (Chaucer links it specifically with the highest-born.) Thus the separation of man and bird offers a striking image of social and cultural disintegration, not from a simple loss of communication, in itself redeemable and lacking the symbolic dimension required for the anarchic forces it heralds, but from Yeats's anguish at the disruption of the order and cohesion, the homo-geneity of the aristocratic society he so admired.
There follows a subtle interplay between this disintegration of the aristocratic ideal, anarchy and violence. Successive drafts of the poem indicate that Yeats had in mind the First World War ("bloody frivolity"), the Bolshevik Revolution (the most striking instance of the destruction of an aristocratic society by egalitarian forces), the threat of anarchy and widespread violence in Ireland, all of which seemed to confirm Nietzsche's predictions, and the prophecies of Macgregor Mathers in the late 1890s, of immense wars accompanied by and followed by anarchy (Stallworthy 18-19). Moreover, Yeats's interlocking gyres are in part an attempt to present his cyclical view of history in visual terms. The cone representing the next and imminent era, the "antithetical dispensation," rises from its base to its apex, and similar pyramidal structures have been widely used to symbolize aristocratic, hierarchic societies; while the inverted cone representing the previous two thousand year cycle, the Christian era, rises to its point of greatest expansion, a widening gyre like the ore in which the falcon loses its point of reference. The Christian era had culminated in the egalitarian mass society which Yeats found so distasteful. Historically the "centre," the nadir of the inverted cone, is the birth of Christ, the "first coming." However, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" because Christianity had "dwindled to a box of toys" (Autobiographies 333). In those drafts of the poem which Stallworthy managed to decipher, the blanket-word "things," which seems to have a looseness uncharacteristic of Yeats's drive towards greater precision of statement, is the only word that never changes its form. While it implies that literally everything, the whole social and cultural superstructure, is falling apart, there are other more compact and personal associations which echo the themes already mentioned. Yeats would also have had in mind the disintegration of material objects such as his own Thoor Ballylee, itself a crumbling monument to a threatened culture and incorporating a "gyre" in the form of a spiral staircase. <!--pagebreak-->Violence, which for Yeats was symptomatic of the end of one era and the birth of another, becomes widespread as the inverted cone reaches its point of greatest expansion: "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" as the mass society promulgates its disruptive ideologies, a line that creates a singular effect from the inherent ambiguity of the word "mere" and its surprising juxtaposition with "anarchy." Here it has a primary meaning as a superlative in the sense of "sheer anarchy," suggestive of vastly destructive forces, and a secondary meaning as a scornful understatement, as in the phrase "a mere bagatelle." In an early draft Yeats had written "vile anarchy," which is more emphatic but which lacks the ambiguity and internal tension of the final version. The change was completely successful and provides for the first stanza a controlled center which does hold, and which allows the subsequent images of violence to intensify. It is interesting to identify the thought process by which in successive drafts of the poem the passing of innocence gradually assumes the social and cultural dimensions of the associated imagery, from the straightforward "some innocent has died" through "Old wisdom and young innocence," "The gracious and the innocent," "ceremonious innocence," to the greater complexity of "The ceremony of innocence is drowned." It is clear that Yeats increasingly associated this lost innocence with traditional values ("Old wisdom"), graciousness and ceremony, with what he was later to describe as his chosen theme--"traditional sanctity and loveliness" ("Coole Park and Ballilee, 1931"). Immediately after "The Second Coming" in the Collected Poems Yeats placed "A Prayer for my Daughter" whose last stanza reads:
And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree. (Variorurn 405-06)
Innocence is born of "custom and ceremony" which are other names for wealth ("the rich horn") and eminence ("the spreading laurel tree"), for what Yeats revered in the culture of the great houses. Indeed his own contribution to this culture may also be implied as the foliage of the laurel has long been an emblem of poetic distinction. On the other hand "arrogance and hatred" are "peddled in the thoroughfares" by political demagogues, those who "labour for hatred, and so for sterility in various kinds" (Notes to "Meditations in Time of Civil War," Variorum 827). In "The Leaders of the Crowd" Yeats describes these demagogues as slandering their opponents in order to "keep their certainty," which is compounded by a disastrous loss of confidence by those whose position has been systematically undermined by what Yeats calls "Whiggery," a "levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind." The wanton destruction of the great houses, of "all / That comes of the best knit to the best," would never enable "mean roof-trees" to acquire "the gifts that govern men" ("Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation"). The house was Coole Park, the home of Lady Gregory, both house and owner embodiments of the Ascendancy, the Anglo-Irish tradition Yeats so revered and of which he considered his own family to have been a part. Denis Donoghue has suggested that by this time Yeats had given up thinking of "the Big House" as an emblem of intelligence in active relation to power: "He saw it now as an aesthetic image of defeat, the enslavement of the strong to the weak" (56). This provides a context for the anguished complaint which ends the first stanza:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity,
a context in which "the best" and "the worst," words whose meanings are inevitably relative and subjective, echo the sense of the preceding imagery.
Yeats shared the Nietzschean, anti-libertarian view that Christianity had culminated in an egalitarian democracy which, disintegrating into "mere anarchy," could not control the violence, the "blood-dimmed tide." It had loosed on the world, signaling the approach of a new era: "All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, heterogeneous civilisation belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not the continuance of itself but the revelation as in a lightning flash . . . of the civilisation that must slowly take its place" (Variorum 825). <!--pagebreak-->Such is the foundation on which he builds the symbolic structure of the second stanza. The revelation is indeed in the nature of a lightning flash and is both intensely personal and explicitly anti-millenarian, shattering the ostensible Christian conviction that anarchy and violence herald the Second Coming. "Hardly are those words out" before he catches his first glimpse of the monolithic sphinx, the "vast image" (originally "lost image") forgotten but surviving in Spiritus Mundi: "Antithetical revelation is an intellectual influx neither from beyond mankind nor born of a virgin, but begotten from our spirit and history" (A Vision 262). For Yeats a "very ancient symbol" was more than a literary device; it was a part of the "dwelling house of symbols, of images that are living souls," and of the "great memory that renews the world and men's thoughts age after age," which he named Spiritus Mundi (Essays and Introductions 79). He bought Thoor Ballylee not because it would make a comfortable home but because the tower, "important in Maeterlinck as in Shelley," was an ancient symbol he could actually live in. Indeed it fulfilled the requirements of a perfect symbol: it visibly existed and had a physical history (Gordon and Fletcher 26). These attributes are shared by the lion-bodied "shape," which, possessing a man's head, is clearly the male Egyptian sphinx, a royal portrait type through most of Egyptian history, symbolizing both the mighty strength and protective power of Egypt's ruler. All the Egyptian sphinxes are representations of Horus, the Egyptian God of Light, who was reborn each day as the rising sun, the symbol of renewed life, and who was also the Egyptian sky-god who took the form of a falcon, a bird whose figure represented his name and was thus sacred to him. There can be little doubt that Yeats would have been familiar with this mythology; he had even considered introducing the revelation which eventually emerges as sphinx and rough beast with the words, "Surely the great falcon must come." He had long been aware of the sphinx as an ancient symbol, and in the 1890s it had something of a vogue among those symbolist painters he most admired. Charles Ricketts, "my education in so many things" (A Vision 298), had designed Wilde's Sphinx (1894), which is "among the most perfect and wholly characteristic productions of the 1890s," while Moreau's The Sphinx appeared as an illustration in the 1897 volume of the Pageant, a magazine in whose production Ricketts had a large share and in which one of Yeats's stories appeared in 1896 (Gordon and Fletcher 96, 98). Moreover his "instructors" had impressed on Yeats the symbolic significance of the east that had affected European civilization--Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, Egypt: "The East in my symbolism . . . is always human power . . . stretched to its utmost" (A Vision 257).
The vast image "troubles" his sight, implying not so much fear as imperfect vision, like a medium's confused first contact with an unknown spirit. Indeed the shape, situated "somewhere in sands of the desert," manages to appear monumental and vague at the same time, while often in Yeats the desert symbolizes the aridity of attitudes he disliked, notably liberal-democratic individualism and Christian-Platonic idealism and other-worldliness (Variorum 828). Plato in separating "the Eternal Ideas from Nature . . . prepares the Christian desert and the Stoic suicide" (A Vision 271), and this contrast between "idealism" and "nature" or "reality"--possibly derived from, certainly confirmed by, his reading of Nietzsche--became a cardinal feature of his philosophy. The creature has a "lion body and the head of a man," a fusion of awesome humanity and potent beast, of intellect and myth; it has "put on his knowledge with his power" ("Leda and the Swan"). All the predominant associations so far (royal sphinx, bird of nobility, king of beasts) are those of majesty and power, and in his notes to the poem Yeats allows his imaginary tribe to voice his own view of the revelation, which "will not come to the poor but to the great and learned and establish again for two thousand years prince and vizier" (Variorum 825).
Thus the sphinx's gaze is "blank and pitiless as the sun," reminiscent of "the lidless eye that loves the sun," the impassive look of the proud, stern, fearless mind of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy ("Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation"). The Christian or humanitarian is likely to find this pitiless gaze repugnant, but Yeats frequently repudiated humanitarian ideals. (He thought Synge necessary to the Irish dramatic movement partly because he was "incapable of a humanitarian purpose.") The debased "primary pity" of Christianity mocks the stoicism of a Swift, a Villon or indeed a Yeats, and contradicts the law of opposites; the Good Samaritan does not need his Lazarus, "they do not each die the other's life, live the other's death" (A Vision 275). Yeats was impressed by Nietzsche's claim that his attack on "die Mitleidigen," "the Pitying," a crucial element in his critique of Christianity, was in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Spinoza, La Rochefoucauld and Kant. Zarathustra, for example, warns his followers against pity: "All great love is above all its pity: for it seeketh--to create what is loved . . . . All creators, however, are hard" (Thus Spake Zarathustra 102). Thus there is growing tension between a conventional response, pitiless = cruel, for example, and the response Yeats is inviting. <!--pagebreak-->NOTES
1 For other examples of critical responses referred to here see Davie 76-79; Ellman 257-60.
2 See Bloom 317-25; Bohlmann 178-79 (although his interpretation of the poem is necessarily very brief in the context of his general thesis, in my view it comes closest to the meaning Yeats intended); Jeffares 238-44; Melchiori 35-42; Stallworthy 17-25; Weeks 281-92.
3 For discussions of Nietzsche's influence on Years see Bohlmann; Thatcher 139-73.
4 Yeats's philosophical system is set out in A Vision. For explanatory accounts see Bloom 210-91; Ellmann 146-64; Schricker 110-22; Stock 122-64.
WORKS CITED
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-----. A Vision. Rev. ed. London: Macmillan, 1962.
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Source: Papers on Language & Literature, Fall95, Vol. 31 Issue 4, p362, 27p.
