Assignment Paper no. 106

 

Name:- Payal Bambhaniya

Batch :- M.A. Sem.2 (2022-2024)

Roll no.:- 14

Paper no.:- 106

Paper Name:- The Twentieth Century Literature: 1900 to World War II

Assignment Topic:- 'The Second Coming' as Pandemic Poem

Subject Code no. :- 22399

Enrollment no.:- 4069206420220002

Email ID:- payalbambhaniya92@gmail.com

Submitted to:- SMT S. B. Gardi Department of English, MKBU.

'The Second Coming' as Pandemic Poem

Table of Content:-

• Introduction
• About W. B. Yeats
• Historical Context
• Summary of Poem
• 'The Second Coming' as Pandemic Poem

Introduction:- 

The Spanish Flu of 1918, which killed millions of people. Pandemics became a recurring theme in literature and other forms of artistic expression during this period. People suffering mentally and physically from diseases. Works of literature that sought to capture the social, political and personal implications of disease. These Pandemics served as a lens through which writers could explore the condition of people and themes of mortality, community and resilience.

W. B. Yeats:-

William Butler Yeats is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. He was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer, and politician. He was born in Dublin, Ireland (1865-1939). He was a driving force behind the Irish literary establishment who helped to found the Abbey Theatre. In his later years, he served two terms as a Senator of the Irish state. He was influenced by John Keats, William Wordsworth, William Blake and many more. 

From 1900 his poetry grew more physical, realistic and politicised. He moved away from the Transcendental preoccupied with some elements including cyclical theories of life. He had become the chief playwright for the Irish Literary Theatre in 1897, and early on promoted younger poets such as Ezra Pound. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1923. His major works are as below.

• The Countess Cathleen

• The Land of Heart's Desire

• The King's Threshold

• Deirdre 

• Leda and the Swan

• The Second Coming

• Sailing to Byzantium

Yeats first poem placed in the Newspaper was called "The Wanderings of Oisin". He was deeply rooted in Irish culture with its Folklore, legends, music and magic, from which he drew wisdom and inspiration and he wrote about the traditions and history of the Irish nation. In 1899 fell in love with Maud Gonne, a beautiful actress and Passionate Irish nationalist. She is the subject of most of his love poems.

The Second Coming is a poem written in 1919 about the outcome of the First world war and the beginning of the Irish war of independence. The Poem was first printed in The Dial in November 1920, and afterwards included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to allegorically describe the atmosphere of Post-War  Europe. It is considered a major work of Modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.

Historical Context:- 

The Poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence that followed the Easter Rising, at a time before the British Government decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland. Yeats used the phrase 'The Second Birth' instead of 'The Second Coming'. 

The poem is also connected to the 1918-1919 flu pandemic: In the weeks preceding Yeats's writing of the poem, his pregnant wife Georgie Hyde-less caught the virus and was very close to death. The Highest death rates of the Pandemic were among pregnant women - in some areas, they had up to a 70 percent death rate. While his wife was convalescing, he wrote "The Second Coming".

Summary of the Poem:-

The second coming is narrated by a speaker who is observing the world around him with horror. The poem begins with the phrase "Turning and turning in the widening gyre", a sentence that evokes an occult symbol that perpetually fascinated W. B. Yeats: interlocked circles. A gyre is a spiral or vortex, and Yeats believed that the universe was composed of interlocked circles, which together make up individual lives that coalesce to form the whole of existence. The first line is just a complex way of saying that something is happening in this world. Something is churning and awakening; some new existence is rising out of the current haze of life that we all live in, expanding it and enlarging the scope of what life is and altering how the world works on a fundamental level.

The whole first stanza finds the speaker observing a world that is losing touch with order and morality. Violence is destroying innocence, people have become detached from their leaders, something fundamental is dissolving, and people who believe in goodness are being silenced, while the loudest speakers are the villains.

The second stanza describes the speaker's vision for what the Second Coming, this new world redefined by all the violence and chaos that occurred in the past, might look like. He thinks about the "Spiritual Mundi", which is a Latin term meaning "world spirit", and begins to visualise images within this "World Spirit", including desert sphinxes and shadowy birds.

In the Last stanza the speaker is sure that something even worse is coming. Some nightmare- some "rough beast" - is rising, approaching the earth at a rapid pace. He doesn't know what this creature is, but he can sense its approach and it is the ominous core of "The Second Coming", that mysterious tide of evil and mystery approaching the world in the form of a modernity the world in the form of a modernity full of violence, war and the loss of traditional meaning and values. The speaker asks what beast, whose time has finally come, is dragging itself towards Bethlehem, where it will be born.

"The Second Coming" as a Pandemic Poem:-

Elizabeth Outka, a literary Scholar whose fortuitously timed late-2019 book Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature explains about pandemic. The book looks at the small group of authors who addressed the pandemic head-on in their work but also argued that the work of some of the greats- T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats - was deeply affected by the flu in ways that aren't so immediately obvious. Combining literary analysis with flu history and writing by flu survivors, Outka makes it clear that the pandemic wasn't "forgotten" - it just went underground.

Disease, especially pandemics, are difficult to record and memorialise because they impact individuals in highly personal and individualised ways, even though they may be widespread. War, on the other hand,can be justified and sacrifices can be honored. Diseases often impact bodies in ways that are difficult to define, and viruses are invisible, making it an infectious disease, if you die, your family is more likely to die, and there is no sacrificial structure to build around a loss of this kind. Literature, however, is able to capture the complex and invisible conversations that happen between the body and the mind during a disease, as well as the small and personal losses that individuals experience when they lose loved ones.

It's difficult to memorialise a pandemic, because disease makes people feel helpless, and there's very little we can do to make meaning from it. With war, even if you disagree with the war, you could at least argue about whether the death was worth it. 

Yeats poem "The Second Coming" captures the terrible aftermath of world war, and all the revolutions that were going on at the time, the political violence in Ireland. The poem is also connected to the 1918-1919 flu pandemic: In the weeks preceding Yeats's writing of the poem, his pregnant wife Georgie Hyde-less caught the virus and was very close to death. The Highest death rates of the Pandemic were among pregnant women - in some areas, they had up to a 70 percent death rate. While his wife was convalescing, he wrote "The Second Coming". 

This atmosphere - things are falling apart; the center cannot hold- an atmosphere of "mere anarchy, loosed upon the world". In the first stanza" The blood-dimmed tide is loosed"; "the ceremony of innocence is drowned." It's a terrific description of a pandemic. Then specific imagery like the blood-dimmed tide - when one of the most frequent effects of this flu was bleeding from the nose, mouth, and ears. Just floods of blood. And then, the way people drown in their beds, from their lungs filling up with fluid… and he has a line about the " Ceremony of innocence being drowned," when it's his wife and unborn baby who were in the process of drowning like that. 

Ans. by ChatGPT:- 

The poem goes on to describe a world that is in turmoil, where "the center cannot hold". This could be interpreted as a reference to the breakdown of social norms and structure during a pandemic, as people are forced to isolate, business shut down, and governments struggle to respond to the crisis.

The poem also included the image of a "rough beast" slouching towards Bethlehem, which has been interpreted as a reference to the biblical Apocalypse. In the context of a pandemic of the fear that the virus could lead to the end of the world as we know it. 

Conclusion:-

Overall, Outka sees "The Second Coming" as a poem that speaks to the way in which the Spanish flu pandemic shattered people's sense of stability and order, leaving them adrift in a world that had been fundamentally transformed. The poem's vivid and evocative language captures the horror and devastation of the pandemic, making it a powerful reminder of the need to be vigilant in the face of global threats.

Thank you for reading and visiting....

Work Cited:- 

https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/05/1918-pandemic-cultural-memory-literature-outka.html 

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "William Butler Yeats". Encyclopedia Britannica, 24 Jan. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Butler-Yeats. Accessed 28 March 2023.

Howard, James. "The Second Coming." LitCharts. LitCharts LLC,  8 May 2019. Web. 28 Mar 2023.

Word Count:- 1638

Images:- 3