Fault of an Image: Agency and Inevitability in “The Second Coming”
The anxieties regarding global chaos and the possibility of individual culpability that inundated popular thought in the aftermath of World War I informs William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming.” At its core, the poem is an exploration of the equivocal boundaries between individual agency—and further, responsibility—and the inevitability of world events determined by an act of divine providence. Rather than embracing negative capability, the speaker of the poem seeks desperately for resolution, an answer to the question of fate and responsibility, although ultimately he finds that humans will certainly fail to effectively channel whatever small agency they may have …show more content…
The lack of rhyme scheme throughout “The Second Coming” assists is creating an uncertain tone: the speaker does not know what is to next occur, and thus each line cannot perfectly correspond to the one that follows. However, the speaker introduces an identical rhyme with the lines, “Surely some revelation is at hand;/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand” (9-10). As the word “surely” informs readers, rather than signaling true certainty regarding an event to come, this rhyme communicates desperation to determine an answer to assuage the speaker’s anxiety. Yeats succeeds in conveying the speaker’s state of paranoia through the repetition in the two lines, portraying him as grasping at a religious eschatology for an answer and relief. The insistence of the imminence of “some revelation” triggers a vision that confirms his anticipation. The shortest independent phrase in the poem— the exclamation of “The Second Coming!”— captures the buildup of emotion that his attempts to assure himself clearly have failed to abate. The speaker’s anxiety that threads through the poem causes him to unwittingly conjure the Second
The anxieties regarding global chaos and the possibility of individual culpability that inundated popular thought in the aftermath of World War I informs William Butler Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming.” At its core, the poem is an exploration of the equivocal boundaries between individual agency—and further, responsibility—and the inevitability of world events determined by an act of divine providence. Rather than embracing negative capability, the speaker of the poem seeks desperately for resolution, an answer to the question of fate and responsibility, although ultimately he finds that humans will certainly fail to effectively channel whatever small agency they may have …show more content…
The lack of rhyme scheme throughout “The Second Coming” assists is creating an uncertain tone: the speaker does not know what is to next occur, and thus each line cannot perfectly correspond to the one that follows. However, the speaker introduces an identical rhyme with the lines, “Surely some revelation is at hand;/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand” (9-10). As the word “surely” informs readers, rather than signaling true certainty regarding an event to come, this rhyme communicates desperation to determine an answer to assuage the speaker’s anxiety. Yeats succeeds in conveying the speaker’s state of paranoia through the repetition in the two lines, portraying him as grasping at a religious eschatology for an answer and relief. The insistence of the imminence of “some revelation” triggers a vision that confirms his anticipation. The shortest independent phrase in the poem— the exclamation of “The Second Coming!”— captures the buildup of emotion that his attempts to assure himself clearly have failed to abate. The speaker’s anxiety that threads through the poem causes him to unwittingly conjure the Second