by W.B. Yeats & W.H. Auden
Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (1919) and Auden’s “Leap Before You Look” (1940), each set so that it does what it says: a gyre that widens until things fall apart, and a descent you can only make by leaping.
tags: poetry, Yeats, Auden, war, diptych
twenty-one years
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats
January 1919, the first winter after the first war
Leap Before You Look
W. H. Auden
December 1940, the second winter of the second war
Two poems from either end of the same peace, twenty-one years apart, and both about the ground going out from under you. Each is set here to do what it says. The first turns in its widening gyre until things fall apart, and the second can only be read by leaping.
IJanuary 1919
The Second Coming
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?
W.B. Yeats, 1919
Twenty-one years later its hour had come round, and the next poem was written from inside it.
IIDecember 1940
Leap Before You Look
The sense of danger must not disappear:The way is certainly both short and steep,However gradual it looks from here;
press the last line to leap
Tough-minded men get mushy in their sleepAnd break the by-laws any fool can keep;It is not the convention but the fearThat has a tendency to disappear.
The worried efforts of the busy heap,The dirt, the imprecision, and the beerProduce a few smart wisecracks every year;
The clothes that are considered right to wearWill not be either sensible or cheap,So long as we consent to live like sheepAnd never mention those who disappear.
Much can be said for social savoir-faire,But to rejoice when no one else is thereIs even harder than it is to weep;
A solitude ten thousand fathoms deepSustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:Although I love you, you will have to leap;Our dream of safety has to disappear.
W.H. Auden, 1940
The first poem watches the centre give way; the second, twenty-one years later, jumps.