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| The Second Coming |
| 作者Author / William Butler Yeats 威廉．巴特勒．葉慈 |
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The Second
Coming
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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: 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 about 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?
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The
Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran New
York: Macmillan, 1989
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The Second Coming
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In
Matt. 24, Christ predicts "the coming of the Son of man" after a time
of great tribulation,
widespread warfare, and natural
disasters. Yeats believed that about every
2000 years
the trend of history reversed
itself and a new age began.
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gyre
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Here the image is that of a
falcon leaving the falconer's wrist and soaring upward
in ever
widening circles, which finally become so wide that the
falconer's control is lost.
Yeats uses the image of the gyre to represent a historical cycle, which
begins with a point of intensity and as it develops spread farther and
farther from the center that gives it its
character. Yeats could have said
that our Christian era of 2000 years got less and less Christ like,
until now it has almost reached an extreme of diffusion and will come
to an end as the reverse process, symbolized by the "rough
beast," is about to begin. |
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interpenetrating cones:
when the first reaches its point of greatest diffusion, the
inner one will be activated at its fine point and begin a downward
spiral that reverses, unwinds, undoes the course of the first.
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Spiritus Mundi
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"The
Spirit of the World" ...a kind of psychic pool of inherited images in
which all human minds share and from which they can draw. (from The Harper Anthology of Poetry.
Ed. John Frederick Nim. NY: Harper, 1981, p.
464)
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