Second Part Of The Poem example essay topic

I realize the true meaning of The Second Coming may actually be societal and not anything religious at all. But maybe that's what a symbolist poet tries to do, write a poem that allows the reader to take their own meaning from it. I'm not really sure, but I would like to think so... especially if I am way off base with my interpretation. I got the feeling that the author might have been trying to focus on the latter part of my explanation regarding the second coming... the part when the devil is loosed onto the world. Surely, this will be a time when "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the word."The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity", made me think of what the people who are left here will be going through. Those who had some decency in them will actually lose it.

Why not sin? God has abandoned them and left them in this horrible place. And those who were already the worst of the worst will be in their glory because this is their place now. Nothing can stop them from wreaking havoc.

When Yeats states that "Surely some revelation is at hand"; I think he is saying that the state of the world leads him to believe that the prophecy of Revelations must be coming. There have been people all through time who have predicted the end was coming based on the societal conditions they were experiencing. Sorry to go off on my own tangent, but I was listening to the radio yesterday and a Police song came on. I forget the name of it at this moment but Sting says Spiritus Mundi in one of his lines and I immediately thought of this poem. Just a little trivial example of how the works we have read in class have crossed over into my "real" life. I thought it was interesting that I picked that out of the song and thought of this poem.

Anyway, the second part of the poem takes a much more frightening tone beginning with the description of the shape. The way Yeats describes the beast gave me a clear description of this horrid thing. I could see a deformed creature with the body of a lion and the head of a man, slinking across the desert with vultures circling around him, waiting to prey on his leftovers. It is an ominous sight and I could actually feel the fear of standing at the edge of that desert and watching this thing trudge toward me, the buzzards alerting me to the fact that this thing leaves carnage in its wake.

Its eyes are pitiless... it will feel absolutely no pangs of humanity as it is loosening the blood-dimmed tide and drowning the ceremony of innocence. When the poet says that "The darkness drops again"; it heightened my anxiety. Now you could no longer see the beast, but you still knew it was coming. Only now you didn't know how fast, where it was, or where to go. All was dark, but you had a glimpse of what was to come and it was scary. I was a little confused by the reference to the sleep vexed to nightmare.

Obviously, the twenty centuries of stony sleep is the time that has passed since the birth of Christ. I think he meant that we had fallen into a kind of sleep by thinking that everything was fine and we could do anything we wanted because we were saved. And this sleep had lead to moral decay and a society where the worst of us benefit from the pain of the best. And now this "nightmare" is coming, just as God told us it someday would. We didn't believe him and now we are unable to do anything to stop it or save ourselves. The poem concludes with a disturbing image of a beast slouching (not walking, not running, but slouching across the desert) toward Bethlehem to be born.

This is an obvious turn on Christ's birth in the same city, making me realize that what God did to save the world, the beast has come to destroy. This is quite a chilling piece.