Despite the fact that I've been posting a bit of poetry lately, I'm really not a big poetry aficionado. I didn't pay nearly enough attention in any of my English classes. My knowledge of Yeats is pretty slim and I don't know much about his poem "Second Coming". I had heard phrases like "the center cannot hold" and "things fall apart" and "the blood-dimmed tide" and "slouches towards Bethlehem" and so on. Really, until I read Monday's op-ed in the NY Times regarding the use of this poem in rhetoric about the Iraq war, I'm pretty sure I didn't know what poem these phrases came from.
I think I had heard the name of the poem before and assumed the "second coming" it referred to had something to do with Jesus, but according to this op-ed and I think it's correct, the apocalyptic event described is not the coming of Christ but a terrible new brand of chaos in a post-religious world.
What the writer of the op-ed, Adam Cohen, points out is that politicians and thinktanks and pundits who quote this poem have no idea how apropos it is for the spiral of violence that is 2007 Iraq. Cohen writes:
Yeats’s bleakly apocalyptic poem has long been irresistible to pundits. What historical era, after all, is not neatly summed up by his lament that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity”? But with its somber vision of looming anarchy, and its Middle Eastern backdrop (the terrifying beast Yeats warns of “slouches towards Bethlehem”), “The Second Coming” is fast becoming the official poem of the Iraq war.
Yeats was no Christian. Instead he believed that he lived in a post-Christian era and that the horrors of World War I revealed a coming change in the world order. His poem is less a prediction of what will come and more of a frightened question of what dangers the future would hold. What god would come next? Exactly what kind of power "slouches towards Bethlehem to be born"?
In terms of Iraq, I believe Cohen is right when he points out that the predictions that seemed so certain have not come true and what looms before us is uncertain, so in a sense, Yeats' poem is fitting for the chaotic violence of Iraq and the unknown catastrophes that await us in the future. Here is Cohen again:
The Second Coming” is a powerful brief against punditry. The Christian era was about the ability to predict the future: the New Testament clearly foretold the second coming of Christ. In the post-Christian era of which Yeats was writing there was no Bible to map out what the next “coming” would be. The world would have to look toward Bethlehem to see what “rough beast” arrived.
This skepticism about predicting the future has more relevance to the Iraq war than any of the poem’s much-quoted first eight lines. The story of the Iraq war is one of confident predictions that never came to pass: “We will find weapons of mass destruction”; “we will be greeted as liberators”; “the insurgency is in its last throes.”
This skepticism about predicting the future has more relevance to the Iraq war than any of the poem’s much-quoted first eight lines. The story of the Iraq war is one of confident predictions that never came to pass: “We will find weapons of mass destruction”; “we will be greeted as liberators”; “the insurgency is in its last throes.”
Perhaps, before our nation casually and cavalierly starts a unilateral war again, unleashing a Pandora's Box of violence, our leaders will consider Yeats' warning. After all, our many Christian leader certainly have not been taking Jesus' teachings on violence into consideration.
Grace and Peace,
Chase
No comments:
Post a Comment