'The Second Coming', by W.B. Yeats Poem animation

Heres a virtual movie of Maude Gonne virtualy reciting 'The Second Coming' by her l,ongtime friend and confidant William Butler Yeats. There are many theories as to the meaning iof this exquisite poem,but to my mind it is as the title suggests calling or hoping for a second coming of Jesus Christ or a revival in Christian values after the the horrors of world war one and the terror and turmoil Yeats had lived through with the uprising in Ireland

"The Second Coming" is a poem composed by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in 1919 and first printed in The Dial (November 1920) and afterwards included in his 1921 collection of verses titled Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and second coming as allegory to describe the atmosphere in post-war Europe.[1] The poem is considered a major work of Modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections including The Norton Anthology of Modernist Poetry.

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War.[3] While the various manuscript revisions of the poem refer to the Renaissance, French Revolutions, the Irish rebellion, and those of Germany and of Russia, Richard Ellman and Harold Bloom suggest the text refers to the Russian Revolution of 1917. Bloom argues that Yeats takes the side of the counter-revolutionaries and the poem suggests that reaction to the revolution would come too late.[4] Early drafts also included such lines as: "And there's no Burke to cry aloud no Pitt," and "The good are wavering, while the worst prevail.".

Kind Regards

Jim Clark
All rights are reserved on this video recording copyright Jim Clark 2011

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: a waste of desert sand; 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 Wind 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?

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[pauguspass]

The otherworldly feel really heightens the impact. Thanks for this...