The Second Coming

This is a reading of "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats.

The reader's solemnity and the gravity of his voice load every word with meaning and understated emotional intensity. His rhythm feels natural and appropriate to the poem, instead of following the (occasionally broken) iambic pentameter. You can try and read it for yourself in the singsong rhythm of iambic pentameter, but it sounds distinctly unnatural due to the wording. Yeats himself may have been more rigid; his hypnotic readings of his own poems sound chanted, as if they were spells or invocations. You can hear a recording of Yeats discussing and reading his own poetry here.

Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" in 1919, believing that the world was approaching a terrible and apocalyptic time. Its title references the Second Coming of Christ, but the poem does not treat this concept rapturously- it is filled with an ominous sense of foreboding, of inevitable doom and the end of an age. Yeats had a well developed system of symbolism, and believed in universally meaningful symbols held in a collective unconscious that he called "Spiritus Mundi." This is similar to Carl Jung's archetypes, but Yeats went further still. He also believed that history, of individuals as well as humanity and civilization, worked in a spiraling system of "gyres," contrary forces that weaken or strengthen inversely to each other. The Second Coming was supposed to occur as one gyre reached its apex and the other its nadir, which also marked the shift from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. The "twenty centuries of stony sleep" likely refers to the astrological cycle of ages, approximately 26,000 years long.

The imagery of "The Second Coming" is strange and disturbing; the spiral of the gyre, the falcon on its own, the "blood-dimmed tide" drowning innocence, and the outright declaration of anarchy all reference a loss of control. The image of the Sphinx slouching towards Bethlehem through the desert with its "gaze bland and pitiless as the sun" suggests a deeply malevolent creature, certainly not a benevolent messiah.

A sense of inevitability seems to pervade the reader's voice, and he takes on the same bleak tone that the poem naturally carries. Brief, almost imperceptible pauses on key words and a harsher, more broken rhythym in places (such as the line "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last") hammer the poem into the listener's mind. The rhythm and tone of this particular reading are perfectly suited for the content and phrasing of the poem.

I'd like to mention that this is the same person that read "A Dialogue of Self and Soul" in one of the reviews below. His channel on YouTube is "SpokenVerse" and he has used "Tom O'Bedlam" as a pseudonym. The choice of name is interesting; you can see for yourself.

As an interesting aside, the anonymous reader had almost abandoned his project of daily poetry readings due to YouTube taking down one of his videos. Here's the story from Roger Ebert.