Yeats

Influenced by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Yeats’ recurring image of the gyre in ‘The Second Coming’, a historical cycle of two thousand years, predicts the expected anarchy as the world’s trajectory along the gyre of science, democracy and heterogeneity is shattered. Consequentially, this cycle manoeuvres along the interior gyre of Yeats’ lifelong fascination with the occult and mysticism on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation. This is an antithesis to the reality of Christianity as “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. This use of caesura and aphorism adds drama and weight to the reference of entropy; that within any stable system there is the tendency towards disintegration as the “blood-dimmed tide is loosed”, signalling the metaphorical growing murderousness of Europe in relinquishing notions of Christianity into occultism. Thus, manoeuvring from a plain of stability into chaos, the “turning and turning in the widening gyre”, through the repetition of verbs, presents the contrary, yet balanced, motions inherent as “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”. This oxymoron illustrates the present naturalised violence in the beginning of Yeats’ mystical theory of the universe. Hence, in the inevitable change in the recurring image of the gyre, Yeats notes that, as a result of the end of the Christian era, “the best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”, signalling through antithesis that evil happens when good people are gone; the good are demoralised and the bad, the mystics and occultists according to Christians, will reign. Consequentially, the “mere anarchy” as a result of the gyre illustrates the chaos involved in the historical inevitability in the end of the Christian era. Nonetheless, to an extent, this chaotic inevitability is demonstrated in ‘The Second Coming’ through Yeats’ use of blank verse, where despite a balanced metre, ending clauses fail to rhyme (“hold” and world”).
Like ‘The Second...