Joni Mitchell's "Slouching towards Bethlehem"

Joni Mitchell's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is a musical adaptation of W.B. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming" from her 1991 album "Night Ride Home." Although Mitchell's adaptation retains much of Yeat's original wording, she relocates and rephrases certain lines as well as adds her own voice to the poem, thereby lengthening it significantly (compare Mitchell with Yeats). For instance lines such as " The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" in Yeats become " Nothing is sacred / The ceremony sinks / Innocence is drowned / In anarchy / The best lack conviction / Given some time to think / And the worst are full of passion / Without mercy" in Mitchell's rendering of the poem. Mitchell also significantly gives "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" a repeated chorus based on the second stanza of "The Second Coming." This allows Mitchell to put Yeats' poem into a form that follows musical and lyrical conventions, whereby the repetition of a chorus helps tie together individual verses to emphasize important, overarching themes, therefore giving the piece a sense of unity.

Mitchell's adaptation of "The Second Coming" also includes her own lyrical voice in the verses. As Tyson mentioned in his post, much of "The Second Coming" is informed by Yeats' own ideas of history and symbolism espoused in The Vision, but Mitchell's version arguably removes some of this Yeatsian fingerprint by leaving out terms such as "Spiritus Mundi" and putting in her own lyrics to mirror the foreboding tone of the poem. For instance, the lines " Vast are the shadows / That straddle and strafe / And struggle in the darkness / Troubling my eyes" seem to be a reworking of the "Spiritus Mundi" that troubles the speaker's sight in "The Second Coming".

"Slouching Towards Bethlehem" also uses musical accompaniment to reinforce the foreboding tone of the poem by using percussion and a brass section to add a dimension of tense grandeur to Mitchell's lilting vocals and guitar work. Overall, Mitchell's musical rendering of Yeats' poem is musically pleasing and offers a balance between "The Second Coming" and Mitchell's lyrical voice that doesn't sacrifice meaning or tone in Yeats' original work.