Essay: On Yeats’ ‘Second Coming’ and the Power of Poetry

by T.M. Moore

I had just finished teaching one of the adult classes at our church on the meaning of Christmas, using John Milton’s Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity as my text. We examined many aspects of this great poem—themes, development, structure and rhyme scheme, poetic devices, and classical and Biblical allusions—and I showed the class how all these elements worked together to support Milton’s basic proposition, that the coming of Christ heralds the new age of salvation.

Many in that class of older adults were visibly moved, and commented on how the poem enlarged their understanding of Christmas. Others simply reported on how delightful and interesting they found the presentation. One woman said, “I haven’t thought about Milton since high school!” Another asked, “Why don’t they write poetry like this anymore?”

Does poetry have power to provoke, move, excite, disturb, and delight? Seems pretty obvious it does. So why doesn’t more poetry wield such power?

The State of Poetry Today

In a day when virtually everyone can write poetry—since matters of form, rhyme, and the classic poetic devices are regarded as secondary to mere self-expression—much, perhaps most, of the poetry circulating in journals and on websites and in books lacks the charm and resonance traditionally associated with verse. Instead of building on common experiences, much contemporary poetry is self-referential in the extreme, or employs images that confuse rather than endear, or that are too far removed from the experience of most readers to communicate their intended message or stir the desired affection in all but a few. And the form of most contemporary verse, lacking in any discernible rhythm, pace, or lyric, can be more distracting than helpful.

Poetry today is actually thriving, with hundreds of journals and scores of new books being published every year. But, as Dana Gioia pointed out in his landmark study, Can Poetry Matter?, most of this poetry is written for an elite caste of poets and critics, a professional fellowship and mutual admiration society devoted to formlessness, complexity, egalitarianism, and confessionalism in poetry—just the sort of stuff that leaves most readers scratching their heads and moving on to other things.

There are exceptions, of course. Many fine poets whose work actually adheres to traditional forms, who labor to achieve pleasing meters and rhymes, or draw on more accessible experiences and themes, have produced some truly powerful verse. Wendell Berry, Seamus Heaney, Billy Collins, Scott Cairns, and a handful of others come to mind. And some truly great poets have only recently departed the scene—besides Heaney, I’m thinking of Czeslaw Milosz and Denise Levertov. But most readers will not be familiar with these names, or know how to find their poems. This is because, when it comes to poetry as a staple of the reading diet, most readers have long ago lost their appetite—if they ever had one.

I have my own thoughts about how this lamentable situation has come to pass, but I shall reserve them for perhaps another occasion. My purpose here is rather to entice the reader to take up the task of poetry again—or perhaps for the first time—and discover the surprising affective power and intellectual satisfaction that comes from studying well-crafted verse.

The Power of Poetry

I am always somewhat bemused by people’s responses to good poetry. In my preaching, teaching, and writing, I will very often use a poem from the great Christian heritage of verse, or an original composition, to illustrate or expand on an idea. Once I even taught a course on Biblical worldview, using as my primary text an anthology of English Christian poetry from the middle ages to the present (A Sacrifice of Praise, James H. Trott, ed., Cumberland House, 1999). The response is always the same: people love the poems, talk about them with great excitement and animation, even get fairly giddy about them. Then, when the session is over, they forget about poetry and fall back into their established reading practices.

Poetry can do so much for us. Besides providing reflective seasons of deep delight and wonder, poetry can teach us how to slow down and be better observers of the ordinary in life. It can make connections between apparently unrelated things and surprise us by revealing the common threads of our experience. Poetry teaches us to appreciate the beauty of just the right word and the mystery of sounds and images woven together just so. It speaks to our hearts, assuring us that others have felt what we were too ashamed or embarrassed to reveal, and perhaps convicting us of misguided affections. It shows us that others have thoughts from perspectives we considered peculiar to ourselves and, therefore, weird. Poetry can increase our sensitivity to others, teach us how to see the glory of God in created things, slow down time so that we are able to milk the moments for all they’re worth; it can stimulate the imagination, put into thoughts sentiments that we only previously knew as feeling, and render into feeling what was before merely an abstract idea. Poetry can connect us with our past, immerse us more deeply in our present, and project us into futures never before imagined.

Perhaps this is why so much of the Bible is written in poetry. Much of the wisdom literature, all of the psalms, and large sections of the prophets were inspired and composed in verse precisely because of the great power latent in this literary form. To be sure, there are significant differences between the way Hebrew verse works and what most of us think of as poetry. But once you learn the conventions of those ancient forms, vast sections of the Bible begin to shine with new and brighter light.

A Personal Perspective

I shall never forget the first time I really encountered the power of poetry. As a child I had written many poems—one that even made it to the Illinois State Fair. But these were mostly word games, childish exercises in rhyme and meter with no deeper significance. Then, as a freshman in college, somewhere near the end of a course on 19th and 20th century English poets, we were assigned to read and analyze W. B. Yeats’ masterpiece, “The Second Coming.” From the first lines of this jarring verse, my mind was riveted to the Irish bard’s words:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.

Immediately I saw myself as that spiraling falcon, attempting to break free from past ties of home and family, but careering into an unknown and potentially dangerous future. It was the late ‘60s, and I felt that my growing sense of waywardness and uncertainty was the common experience of many of my peers. The poem continues:

Things fall apart; the center 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.

Yeats was writing in 1919, in the aftermath of the war to end all wars. But he was seeing through to our day, with political assassinations, an unpopular war, and cultural and social upheaval on every hand. His prescience, or perhaps the timelessness of his words sent chills down my spine. Was this the world I was entering, the world I would be helping to create? What were my own convictions? What was I passionate about? What was happening to my innocence? The next stanza begins:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

I was not a Christian at the time, but I knew about revelation, and I had heard about the Second Coming. Suddenly I realized that I was desperately in need of some revelation about my life. I needed someone or something to break into my life and point me in the direction of something permanent, something I would be willing to give my whole life to without reservation. But nothing was on the horizon for me. Nothing, that is, but hope in hope.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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.

What was happening in me, I wondered? Was I becoming a different person, part human and part animal—part beast? I felt as though Yeats had seen through to that “blank and pitiless” part of my being that urged me on to succeed at all costs, and at everyone else’s expense. I was becoming a child of my culture—shaped by the spirit of the world—and I began to fear for where that process might lead.

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 toward Bethlehem to be born?

I remember distinctly that this was the first time in my life I ever had a serious thought about what we now refer to as “worldview.” I wondered, Where is all this social and cultural upheaval leading us? What new messianic hope will be born from it? And will it, once revealed, be found to be a “rough beast” that will enslave and crush us all? Where will I be, and what will happen to me, if I keep on spiraling away from the familiar voices of my childhood?

This poem began in me a season of searching for something stable and meaningful to make sense out of my life, a search which ended nearly a year later, when I made a life-changing commitment to follow Jesus Christ.

Poetry Can Matter

Answering his own question, Dana Gioia insists that poetry can matter. The real question is whether or not it will matter for you. Let me offer some simple guidelines to help you get around in the world of poetry, so that you can experience the power of this unique art form to affect your life.

First, be patient, and sample widely. Learning to enjoy poetry is not like eating at my house, where every meal Susie fixes is a culinary delight. It’s more like moving to a new town and sampling the restaurants and their cuisine. Sure, they’re all OK, but you have to keep at it to find one or two, and one or two entrees that are real eating experiences. This takes time. So it is with poetry. Read until you find a poet or two you really like, and a few poems that speak to you. Then savor them over and over.

Second, learn about how poetry works, what’s going on in a poem. Good poets work hard to select just the right words and phrases, in just the right places, to communicate their experience and ideas. Unless you know how to pick up on the cues they have embedded in their poems, you will invariably miss a great deal of the delight and meaning encoded there.

Third, find a few poems that you really like. Read them aloud, over and over. Memorize them. Then ask yourself what it is about these poems that speaks so powerfully to you. Is it the themes? The rhythm? The clever use of words? Identify as many things as you can about the poems you like that contribute to their being pleasing or meaningful to you. This will help you in learning to appreciate other poets and poems as well.

Finally, find someone with whom you can read and share your poetry—both what you are reading as well as any you might attempt to write. Susie is always so affirming as she reviews my work and makes suggestions about how to improve. The Society of Classical Poets is a unique meeting-ground for like-minded aficionados. I find the comments offered on contributors’ poems help me in learning to read and write in this powerful form.

In a world where words are cheap, a world in which a kind of Gresham’s Law of language is debasing conversation and meaning everywhere, poetry can play a powerful role in our lives. It can give us a new appreciation for the power of language and help us to clarify and nurture our thoughts and affections, so that we can live more fully, humbly, and graciously.

So set aside time from TV and other trivial pursuits, and plunge into the world of formal poetry, where beauty, goodness, and truth come to life with lasting delight and power.

T.M. Moore is Principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe. He is the author of more than 30 books, including 6 volumes of poetry, and his poems appear in various journals and at several websites. He and his wife and editor, Susie, make their home in the Champlain Valley of Vermont. This essay is the first in a series.