Sunday, 27 February 2022

second coming:context of pandemic in the poem

(1)pandemic reading of second coming

Here in this blog I have wrote on poem of Yeats second coming. This poem has three different context. Here I connect this poem with pandemic. that how pandemic is connect with this poem which is given as a task here I wrote this blog as a response . To know more about this task

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About W.B.Yeats



William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish literary establishment who helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State.


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?


 The poem is written by William Butler  Yeats.  As per my understanding Here in the poem the readers can read this poem with three contexts.

Biblical reading

Political reading

Pandemic reading

Here I connect the poem with pandemic.

About the poem

The Second Coming" is one of W.B. Yeats's most famous poems. Written in 1919 soon after the end of World War I, it describes a deeply mysterious and powerful alternative to the Christian idea of the Second Coming—Jesus's prophesied return to the Earth as a savior announcing the Kingdom of Heaven. The poem's first stanza describes a world of chaos, confusion, and pain. The second, longer stanza imagines the speaker receiving a vision of the future, but this vision replaces Jesus's heroic return with what seems to be the arrival of a grotesque beast. With its distinct imagery and vivid description of society's collapse, "The Second Coming" is also one of Yeats's most quoted poems.

When Yeats has  started writing this poem he was in very tensed mood.he was not going through the normal mood.when the poem was wrote it is eventful month of January.



Pandemic reading:

It is very necessary part in today's  time that 

Read the poem with the connection of the pandemic because in today's  time we have a corona pandemic  throughout  the world.

3

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

 When the readers read these lines they easily connect with pandemic or in the lockdown  time. Because at that  time the best people are wearing masks  and staying at home.when the worst people  are  Roaming  outside without any fear.

Due to pandemic everything is falling apart and no one can control things. Lots of people are dying on that time, committed suisideIn that pandemic  time no one left to talk about sanity. On that pandemic  time innocence  became valueless.

The readers can compare this poem with pandemic time everything is disintegration on that time even if lots of struggle done by the medical officer  but it can't  work during the  time of pandemic


 

 So, as. We know that people became more religious at that pandemic  time. the readers can relate this poem with this pandemic  time so when the readers read this line


A shape with lion body and the head of a man,  

So it can be that the people of Christian religion are waiting for the second coming  of Jesus christ. Likewise in hindu religion the hindu people are waiting for some extraordinary  soul. In the pandemic time people are hoping  that some miracle will happen in that  worst time.


It can also be argued that when the poet wrote the poem many events has happened  The main event which compare with this time is spanish flu and his wife Georgiana  Hyde lees who was pregnant she was stricken  by  that Spanish flu.Like wise many pragent women are striken by the corona pandamic  also many Pragent women striken by the virusduring that  pandamic time.so this poem  has pandamic  connection.



2) critical analysis of any other poem written by W.B.YEATS.


 About the poem

Death' is not perhaps numbered among the most famous poems by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), but it is probably the shortest of all his finest poems. In just a dozen lines, Yeats examines human attitudes to death, contrasting them with an animal's ignorance of its own mortality.


                          Death

Nor dread nor hope attend

A dying animal;

A man awaits his end

Dreading and hoping all;

Many times he died,

Many times rose again,

A great man in his pride

Confronting murderous men

Casts derision upon

Supersession of breath;

He knows death to the bone –

Man has created death.

Analysis of the poem

Here Yeats compares the sense of humans  with the sense of animals. Here the reader can argue that the human has power, personality as well as mind and consciousness  also, but it is  true that the readers or can not decide that animals  has not so conscious.we don't  know if they are conscious or not as well as we can't  say that animals  are not conscious. Here  Yeats  also says that animals have no hope of life after death as the human being has.


Here Yeats also makes a reference of  Shakespeare's  Julius Caesar as in that text the dialogue  is used that "cowards are killed Many times before their death.


Indeed, a ‘great man’, one who has to deal with, and confront, men who commit murder, has learnt to ridicule man’s fixation upon death, which is described as mere ‘Supersession of breath’. ‘Supersession’ is an intriguing word here. It means ‘cessation’ or ‘discontinuance’,


The poem, then, suggests an ambivalence: when we breathe our last breath on this earth, do we merely replace one kind of existence with another? What happens to us when we die?


Not that these questions trouble the ‘great man’ Yeats mentions: he ‘knows death to the bone’ and knows that ‘Man has created death’  , that is, death is a man-made concept. Yeats is not denying that men die; what he is rejecting here is the notion that death or mortality is something we should dwell too much upon.


an animal does not live its life governed by questions of what happens when it shuffles off this mortal coil, or what might await it after it’s breathed its last on this earth.











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