An In-Depth Guide to Yeats The Second Coming

An In-Depth Guide to Yeats The Second Coming William Butler Yeats wrote â€Å"The Second Coming† in 1919, soon after the end of World War I, known at the time as â€Å"The Great War† because it was the biggest war yet fought and â€Å"The War to End All Wars† because it was so horrific that its participants dearly hoped it would be the last war. It was also not long since the Easter Rising in Ireland, a rebellion that was brutally suppressed that was the topic of Yeats’ earlier poem Easter 1916, and the Russian Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the long rule of the czars and was accompanied by its full share of lingering chaos. It’s no wonder the poet’s words convey his sense that the world he knew was coming to an end. â€Å"The Second Coming,† of course, refers to the Christian prophecy in the Bible’s Book of Revelation that Jesus will return to reign over Earth in the end times. But Yeats had his own mystical view of the history and future end of the world, embodied in his image of the â€Å"gyres,† cone-shaped spirals that intersect so that each gyre’s narrowest point is contained inside the widest part of the other. The gyres represent different elemental forces in historical cycles or different strains in the development of an individual human psyche, each beginning in the purity of a concentrated point and dissipating/degenerating into chaos (or vice versa) and his poem describes an apocalypse very different from the Christian vision of the end of the world. The Second Coming To better discuss the piece on hand, lets refresh ourselves by rereading this classic piece: Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe 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 everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand.The Second Coming! Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image out of  Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desertA 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 itReel shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again; but now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Notes on Form The underlying metric pattern of â€Å"The Second Coming† is iambic pentameter, that mainstay of English poetry from Shakespeare onward, in which each line is made up of five iambic feet - da DUM / da DUM / da DUM / da DUM / da DUM. But this fundamental meter is not immediately evident in Yeats’ poem because the first line of each section - its difficult to call them stanzas because there are only two and they are nowhere near the same length or pattern - begins with an emphatic trochee and then moves into a very irregular, but nonetheless incantatory rhythm of mostly iambs: TURN ing / and TURN / ing in / the WIDE / ning GYRESURE ly / some RE / ve LA / tion IS / at HAND The poem is sprinkled with variant feet, many of them like the third foot in the first line above, pyrrhic (or unstressed) feet, that enhance and emphasize the stresses that follow them. And the last line repeats the strange pattern of the first lines of the section, beginning with a bang, the trochee, followed by the tripping of unstressed syllables as the second foot is turned around into an iamb: SLOU ches / toward BETH / le HEM / to be / BORN There are no end-rhymes, not many rhymes at all, in fact, though there are many echoes and repetitions: Turning and turning...The falcon ... the falconerSurely ... at handSurely the Second Coming ... at handThe Second Coming! Altogether, the effect of all this irregularity of form and emphasis combined with the incantatory repetitions creates the impression that â€Å"The Second Coming† is not so much a made thing, a written poem, as it is a recorded hallucination, a dream captured. Notes on Content The first stanza of â€Å"The Second Coming† is a powerful description of an apocalypse, opening with the indelible image of the falcon circling ever higher, in ever-widening spirals, so far that â€Å"The falcon cannot hear the falconer.† The centrifugal impetus described by those circles in the air tends to chaos and disintegration - â€Å"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold † - and more than chaos and disintegration, to war - â€Å"The blood-dimmed tide† - to fundamental doubt - â€Å"The best lack all conviction† - and to the rule of misguided evil - The worst / Are full of passionate intensity.† The centrifugal impetus of those widening circles in the air, however, is no parallel to the Big Bang theory of the universe, in which everything speeding away from everything else finally dissipates into nothingness. In Yeats’ mystical/philosophical theory of the world, in the scheme he outlined in his book A Vision, the gyres are intersecting cones, one widening out while the other focuses into a single point. History is not a one-way trip into chaos, and the passage between the gyres not the end of the world altogether, but a transition to a new world -   or to another dimension. The second section of the poem offers a glimpse into the nature of that next, new world: It is a sphinx - â€Å"a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi... / A shape with lion body and the head of a man† - therefore it is not only a myth combining elements of our known world in new and unknown ways, but also a fundamental mystery, and fundamentally alien - â€Å"A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.† It does not answer the questions posed by the outgoing domain - therefore the desert birds disturbed by its rising, representing the inhabitants of the existing world, the emblems of the old paradigm, are â€Å"indignant.† It poses its own new questions, and so Yeats must end his poem with the mystery, his question: â€Å"what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?† It has been said that the essence of great poems is their mystery, and that is certainly true of â€Å"The Second Coming.† It is a mystery, it describes a mystery, it offers distinct and resonant images, but it also opens itself to infinite layers of interpretation. Commentary and Quotations â€Å"The Second Coming† has resonated in cultures all over the world since its first publication, and many writers have alluded to it in their own work. A wonderful visual demonstration of this fact is online at Fu Jen University:  a rebus of the poem with its words represented by the covers of the many books that quote them in their titles.

Hernan Cortes and His Captains

Hernan Cortes and His Captains Conquistador Hernan Cortes had the perfect combination of bravery, ruthlessness, arrogance, greed, religious fervor, and insubordination to be the man who conquered the Aztec Empire. His audacious expedition stunned Europe and Mesoamerica. He did not do it alone, however. Cortes had a small army of dedicated conquistadors, important alliances with native cultures who hated the Aztecs, and a handful of dedicated captains who carried out his orders. Cortes captains were ambitious, ruthless men who had the right blend of cruelty and loyalty, and Cortes would not have succeeded without them. Who were Cortes top captains? Pedro de Alvarado, the Hotheaded Sun God With blond hair, fair skin, and blue eyes, Pedro de Alvarado was a marvel to behold for the natives of the New World. They had never seen anyone quite like him, and they nicknamed him Tonatiuh, which was the name of the Aztec sun god. It was a fitting nickname, as Alvarado had a fiery temper. Alvarado was part of the Juan de Grijalva expedition to scout the Gulf Coast in 1518 and had repeatedly pressured Grijalva to conquer native towns. Later in 1518, Alvarado joined the Cortes expedition and soon became Cortes most important lieutenant. In 1520, Cortes left Alvarado in charge in Tenochtitlan while he went to deal with an expedition led by Panfilo de Narvaez. Alvarado, sensing an attack on the Spanish by the inhabitants of the city, ordered a massacre at the Festival of Toxcatl. This so infuriated the locals that the Spanish were forced to flee the city a little more than a month later. It took Cortes a while to trust Alvarado again after that, but Tonatiuh was soon back in his commanders good graces and led one of the three causeway assaults in the siege of Tenochtitlan. Later, Cortes sent Alvarado to Guatemala. Here, he conquered the descendants of the Maya who lived there. Gonzalo de Sandoval, Cortes Right-Hand Man Gonzalo de Sandoval was barely 20 years old and without military experience when he signed on with the Cortes expedition in 1518. He soon showed great skill at arms, loyalty, and the ability to lead men, and Cortes promoted him. By the time the Spanish were masters of Tenochtitlan, Sandoval had replaced Alvarado as Cortes right-hand man. Time and again, Cortes trusted the most important assignments to Sandoval, who never let his commander down. Sandoval led the retreat on the Night of Sorrows, conducted several campaigns before the reconquest of Tenochtitlan, and led a division of men against the longest causeway when Cortes lay siege to the city in 1521. Sandoval accompanied Cortes on his disastrous 1524 expedition to Honduras. He died at the age of 31 of illness while in Spain.   Cristobal de Olid, the Warrior When supervised, Cristobal de Olid was one of Cortes more reliable captains. He was personally very brave and fond of being right in the thick of the fighting. During the Siege of Tenochtitlan, Olid was given the important job of assaulting the Coyoacn causeway, which he did admirably. After the fall of the Aztec Empire, Cortes began to worry that other conquistador expeditions would poach land along the southern frontiers of the former empire. He sent Olid by ship to Honduras with orders to pacify it and establish a town. Olid switched loyalties, however, and accepted the sponsorship of Diego de Velazquez, Governor of Cuba. When Cortes heard of this betrayal, he sent his kinsman Francisco de las Casas to arrest Olid. Instead, Olid defeated and imprisoned Las Casas. However, Las Casas escaped and killed Olid sometime in late 1524 or early 1525.   Alonso de Avila Like Alvarado and Olid, Alonso de Avila had served on Juan de Grijalvas mission of exploration along the gulf coast in 1518. Avila had the reputation of being a man who could fight and lead men, but who had a habit of speaking his mind. By most reports, Cores disliked Avila personally, but trusted his honesty. Although Avila could fight (he fought with distinction in the Tlaxcalan campaign and the Battle of Otumba), Cortes preferred to have Avila serve as an accountant and entrusted him with much of the gold discovered on the expedition. In 1521, before the final assault on Tenochtitlan, Cortes sent Avila to Hispaniola to defend his interests there. Later, once Tenochtitlan had fallen, Cortes entrusted Avila with the Royal Fifth. This was a 20 percent tax on all gold the conquistadors had discovered. Unfortunately for Avila, his ship was taken by French pirates, who stole the gold and put Avila in prison. Eventually released, Avila returned to Mexico and took part in the conquest of the Yucatan. Other Captains Avila, Olid, Sandoval, and Alvarado were Cortes most trusted lieutenants, but other men held positions of importance in Cortes conquest. Gerà ³nimo de Aguilar: Aguilar was a Spaniard marooned in Maya lands on an earlier expedition and rescued by Cortes men in 1518. His ability to speak some Maya language, coupled with the slave girl Malinches ability to speak Nahuatl and Maya, gave Cortes an effective way to communicate with Montezumas emissaries.Bernal Diaz del Castillo: Bernal Diaz was a footsoldier who participated in the Hernandez and Grijalva expeditions before signing on with Cortes. He was a loyal, dependable soldier, and had risen to positions of minor rank by the end of the conquest. He is far better remembered for his memoir The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, which he wrote decades after the conquest. This remarkable book is by far the best source about the Cortes expedition.Diego de Ordaz: A veteran of the conquest of Cuba, Diego de Ordaz was loyal to Diego de Velazquez, governor of Cuba, and even at one point attempted to subvert Cortes command. Cortes won him over, however, and Ordaz became a n important captain. Cortes even entrusted him to lead a division in the fight against Panfilo de Narvaez at the Battle of Cempoala. He was eventually honored with a knightship in Spain for his efforts during the conquest. Alonso Hernandez Portocarrero: Like Cortes, Alonso Hernandez Portocarrero was a native of Medellin. This connection served him well, as Cortes tended to favor people from his hometown. Hernandez was an early confidant of Cortes, and the slave girl Malinche was originally given to him (although Cortes took her back when he learned how useful she could be). Early in the conquest, Cortes entrusted Hernandez to return to Spain, pass along some treasures to the king, and look after his interests there. He served Cortes admirably, but made enemies of his own. He was arrested and died in prison in Spain.Martin Lopez: Martin Lopez was no soldier, but rather Cortes best engineer. Lopez was a shipwright who designed and built the brigantines, which played a crucial role in the siege of Tenochtitlan.Juan Velazquez de Leà ³n: A kinsman of Governor Diego Velazquez of Cuba, Velzquez de Leons loyalty to Cortes was originally dubious, and he joined a conspiracy to oust Cortes early in the campaign. Cortes eventually forgave him, however. Velazquez de Leon became an important commander, seeing action against the Panfilo de Narvaez expedition in 1520. He died during the Night of Sorrows.  Ã‚   Sources Castillo, Bernal Diaz Del. The Conquest of New Spain. Penguin Classics, John M. Cohen (Translator, Introduction), Paperback, Penguin Books, August 30, 1963. Castillo, Bernal Diaz Del. The True History of The Conquest of New Spain. Hackett Classics, Janet Burke (Translator), Ted Humphrey (Translator), UK ed. Edition, Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., March 15, 2012. Levy, Buddy. Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma and the Last Stand of the Aztecs. Hardcover, 1st edition, Bantam, June 24, 2008. Thomas, Hugh. Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes and the Fall of Old Mexico. Paperback, Reprint edition, Simon Schuster, April 7, 1995.