I need poetry help.. I know it is blank verse.. what are meters?+any info?

Question

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 convictions, 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 around 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?

I really need help!

Answer 1

What kind of help do you need?

"The Second Coming" is certainly one of William Butler Yeats' most striking and memorable poems, in part because it is so visionary and other-worldly, but in part because it is so easy to see how what it describes is happening in the world around us every day.

Yes, the poem is indeed written in blank verse, but with a difference. Very few lines are simple iambic pentameter; there are conscious diversons all the way through. For example, the next-to-last line is purely regular iambic pentameter:

And what' rough beast', its hour' come round' at last'

[sorry, Y!A doesn't reporduce my accents very well]

but then the last line switches to trochaic, cutting abruptly to spondaic at the end:

Slouch' es to' wards Beth' le hem' to' be' born.'

The regularity of the one line reflects the predictable behavior of the "rough beast," just waiting its time to be born. Then the heavy shifting pace of the other line reflects the "slouching" of the beast at this "second coming."

Similarly the first few lines of the poem begin with what promise to be rhyming couplets; except that the rhymes are false or half rhymes: gyre/-ner, hold/world, where, drowned; that is, AABBAB, with the rhymes becoming less pronounced and eventually disappearing altogether. The disappearance altogether of these orderly rhymes (offbeat though they may be) reflects the disappearance of order in the world around us, which is the dominant theme of the poem.

"The Second Coming" grows out of Yeats' visionary history. For a somewhat detailed analysis, see

http://www.yeatsvision.com/SecondNotes.html

particularly the visual depiction of the spiraling gyres and the chart of the historic cycles of 2000 years, especially the Olympian/polytheistic dispensation (2100BCE to 1BC) and the Christian/monotheistic dispensation (1BCE to 2100AD):

http://www.yeatsvision.com/Images/Graphics/6000R.gif

The first part of the poem develops the metaphorical significance of the controlling image: the falcon spiraling (or gyring) out of control of the falconer. In other words, "things fall apart" in our historical era, anarchy is loosed upon the world, innocence is lost, the best people lose faith and decline while the worst are more and more active, "full of passionate intensity." It's easy, reading recent history and the daily news, to find parallels to each of these conditions."

But in the second part, "[t]he poem moves from generality to a vision experienced in the first person, . . . ‘that most common Yeatsian pattern of an objective first movement passing into a more subjective second movement’." For, just as the old order is spiraling out of control, a new world is waiting to be born. "The Second Coming" is not the traditional "second coming of Christ" foretold in the Gospels and the Revelation. It is the coming of a second "vast image," a mythic beast, "with lion body and the head of a man," "moving its slow thighs." The coming, or birth, of this beast will bring about a reversal of history, just as the birth of Christ in Bethlehem gave rise the a new dispensation.

To analyze this poem, I think you need to respond personally: What do you see around you that demonstrates how "things fall apart," how "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world"? How can you imagine a "rough beast" that might bring on a new dispensation? Do you find this "revelation . . . at hand," the "rocking cradle," threatening or hopeful or both? Why? Is it good or bad that "twenty centuries of stony sleep" seem to be coming to an end?

Is it possible that what we, looking backward, see as an innocent babe in Bethlehem, might have been seen by someone in the old classical age, lockng forward, as a destructive "rough beast"?

I hope these comments (and links) stimulate your thinking. I hope you will let us know how you respond to these ideas.

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Maybe this might be a better way to represent the rhythm and meter of the last two lines:

And WHAT rough BEAST, its HOUR come ROUND at LAST

SLOUCHes TOWards BETHle HEM TO BE BORN.