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Essay on The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
Yeats starts out with the image of a falcon wheeling about in the sky, far away from the falconer who released it. The bird continues to wheel and gyre further and further away from the falconer. This metaphor stands for the young people who have given up the standards of their parents and grandparents for the new art, the new literature, the new music, and the other novelties of Yeats' time. The poem was composed in 1920.
There is another interpretation of the falcon-falconer image, and that is the image of the head or intellect as the falcon and the rest of the body and the body sensations and feelings heart as the falconer. This idea is reinforced and repeated later in the poem when Yeats brings in the image of the Sphinx, which is a re-connection of these two components. In the image of the Sphinx, the head-intellect is connected to the body. That is the Sphinx isn't broken apart. The giant sculpture is still intact.
The last two lines of the first stanza are simply a commentary on the times. Yeats says "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" (Yeats, 1997). This also suggests dissociation between the best, which Yeats identifies as head people, the intellectuals, and the worst, which Yeats associates with the mob that are those who react with passionate intensity not with careful intellectual study and expression.
In the first stanza of the poem Yeats gives us the first bird metaphor. In the second part of the poem Yeats gives us the second bird metaphor in the form of ‘indignant desert birds’. These creatures appear to have been roosting on the Sphinx, but when the massive beast began to move its slow thighs the birds became agitated and took off.................
