Trump Releases His Plan for 2nd Amendment…
One common criticism of billionaire businessman and presidential candidate Donald Trump is that he far too often speaks in vague generalities and rarely offers specifics about where he stands on the issues.
That is no longer the case, at least regarding his stance on gun rights and the Second Amendment, after Trump released his official policy position on his campaign website.
“The Second Amendment to our Constitution is clear. The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed upon. Period,” the position paper bega
The
Second Coming’ was written in January 1919, according to what
George Yeats told Richard Ellmann (The
Identity of Yeats),
and first appeared in The
Dial and The
Nation in
November 1920 and then in book form in Michael
Robartes and the Dancer (1922).
Jon Stallworthy has analysed the drafting process of the poem
in Between
the Lines (and
the drafts also appear in the Cornell series, Michael
Robartes and the Dancer),
showing how Yeats originally referred to Burke, Pitt and the Germans
on the Russian border, but these details were removed and much of the
poem’s power derives from its prophetic generalisation and
vagueness. In this it has Biblical resonances from the Prophets of
the Old Testament, with its dismayed view of the current state of the
world and its foreboding about what will come.
The
opening image derives from the System and the widening
gyre, an historical movement or trend that started at the birth
of Christ, is figured as a falcon’s towering. In the System,
this gyre is accompanied by a diminishing gyre which reaches its
minimum at the same time as the first reaches its widest extent,
which may therefore be linked to the ‘twenty centuries of stony
sleep’; these gyres have the inevitability of the tides, and like
them are connected to the Moon and its phases. In the symbol of the
falcon, the falconer represents control but stands at the lowest
point of the gyre’s apex, so that, as the falcon towers higher, it
can no longer hear the controlling centre. This leads to the stark,
simple statements ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’.
Indeed, much of the power of the opening section derives from the
simplicity of its language, as well as the accumulation of symbols
and images, which proceed with an oneiric logic through a single
sentence: falcon’s gyre widening, disintegration, anarchy, tide of
blood, drowning of ceremony of innocence, weakness and passion.
The
word ‘Mere’ means both pure and only, and the first section
further emphasises the generality and absoluteness of the situation
with words such as ‘everywhere’ and ‘all’. The ‘Mere
anarchy’ which is loosed (by whom?) like a plague or scourge then
becomes a tide dimmed by blood, recalling the bloody seas of the
Revelation of St John, the flood from the mouth of the serpent and
the vials of wrath (Rev 8:8; 12:15; 16:1-4). The phrase ‘The
ceremony of innocence’ is linked to a poem from later in 1919, ‘A
Prayer for my Daughter’, where the poet asks ‘How but in custom
and ceremony / Are innocence and beauty born?’; here the phrase
suggests a vague image of whatever the reader’s imagination summons
(perhaps white cloth or candles?), which is then engulfed in the
crimson of the multitudinous seas. The view then moves to society and
the abstract groupings of its best and worst: the best are paralysed
by lack of conviction, while the worst are fired with ‘passionate
intensity’, possibly linked to the red tide of anarchy. Yeats is
constantly wary of the intoxicating or brutalising effect of
fanaticism and hatred, both in himself and others, and especially in
the context of the struggle for Irish independence, the Easter Rising
and the Civil War: see, for example, "Easter 1916"
(September 1916); "On a Political Prisoner" (January 1919);
"A Prayer for My Daughter" (June 1919); "Meditations
in Time of Civil War" (1921-23), especially the last two parts,
VI and VII; "Remorse for Intemperate Speech" (August 1931).
The
repetitions and echoes of the first section (‘Turning and turning’,
‘loosed . . . loosed’, ‘falcon . . .
falconer. . . fall’) are emphasised at the beginning of
the second section: ‘Surely some revelation is at hand; /Surely the
Second Coming is at hand. / The Second Coming!’ The phrase used in
the drafts was ‘the second birth’, but in the final version the
idea is linked far more clearly to the Second Coming of Christ, and
this is reinforced by the mention of Bethlehem in the last line. Yet
if this is a second coming, it is not the second coming of Christ
envisaged in Revelation or the Gospels (see Matt 24, Mark 13).
The
poem moves from generality to a vision experienced in the first
person, which Stallworthy characterises as ‘that most common
Yeatsian pattern of an objective first movement passing into a more
subjective second movement’ (Between
the Lines,
24). An image emerges from ‘Spiritus
Mundi’,
the world’s creative and active mind (cf. Anima
Mundi,
the world-soul), which recalls a vision that Yeats himself
experienced when the Tattwic symbol of Fire was pressed to his
forehead by Mathers (Au 185-86).
Here, however, the figure is not a Titan emerging from ruins, but a
figure in ‘sands of the desert’ like the Sphinx at Giza, which is
itself probably an image of solar deity, ‘A shape with lion body
and the head of a man’. (It is worth noting that the sphinx
was regarded in the Golden
Dawn as a combination of elemental forces, particularly the
‘Sphynx’ of their Enochian magic, and with this appearance
represents the combination of Fire and Air, or Leo [lion] and
Aquarius [human] [see RGD 659
ff.], possibly therefore linked with the coming age
of Aquarius.*note)
But Yeats deliberately does not call it a sphinx, describing rather
than naming it, and another source of the symbol’s inspiration was
slightly different: in the Introduction to The
Resurrection he
notes how, at around the time of writing On
Baile’s Strand (1904),
‘I began to imagine, as always at my left side just out of the
range of sight, a brazen winged beast which I associated with
laughing, ecstatic destruction’, noting that the beast was
‘Afterwards described in my poem "The Second Coming."’
(Ex 393, VPl 932).
The Sphinx also appears, named in another poem from 1919, ‘The
Double Vision of Michael Robartes’, where it takes on the Greek
female form, ‘A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw’, and it is
possible that Yeats associated the term more fully with the murderous
inquisitor of the Oedipus myth, since the name literally means
strangler. In ‘The Double Vision’ the Sphinx is one of the
‘heraldic supporters guarding the mystery of the fifteenth phase’
(AV
B 207),
at which a new religious dispensation starts, and symbolises
the conjunction of
Jupiter and Saturn which presides over the start of
an antithetical dispensation
(see below; for more on this poem, see ‘The
Double Vision of Michael Robartes’).
The
image of ‘The Second Coming’ is no heraldic emblem but moves, its
pitiless inhumanity reflected from its human head, and the reeling of
the desert birds echoes the falcon’s towering at the opening of the
poem. The ‘slow thighs’ emphasise its physicality and almost
sexual aura. At this stage the vision ends, but the poem’s speaker
then moves on to a conclusion: ‘now I know’. What he knows,
however, is couched in the most gnomic terms: ‘That twenty
centuries of stony sleep / Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking
cradle’. Given Yeats’s idea of the two-thousand-year
cycles, one of which started at Christ’s birth, we have an
appropriate period (though the first printing in The
Dial had
‘thirty centuries’, the drafts and all later versions have
‘twenty’); but who is the sleeper? is it the stony sphinx or the
world? Elsewhere, Yeats refers to the representative of
the antithetical tincture as
‘Old Rocky Face’ (‘The Gyres’ VP 564;
1936-37; possibly the Delphic Oracle or Shelley’s Ahasureus,
see NC 359)
and it is possible that he saw the ancient polytheistic past
associated with the antithetical as
having lain in stasis during the cycle
of monotheism, associated with its opposite, the primary.
The antithetical awaits
revivification, like ‘mummy-wheat’ which
will sprout when it is sown again, and its dormancy has been a kind
of stony sleep which might well regard the ascendancy of its opposite
as a nightmare (see the Tinctures).
The rocking cradle appears to allude to the baby Jesus, yet Christ is
almost never pictured as lying in a cradle, rather the beasts’
manger, so that in some respects Yeats divorces the nightmare’s
stimulus from Jesus and it may be linked to the ‘Babe’ of ‘The
Mental Traveller’, who is reborn in a reversing cycle of
victimage, which Yeats links to the reversing cycles of A
Vision and
the birth of a ‘child or era’ (AV
B 257
& 277). The final question mark makes the last clause ambiguous,
since the phrase can be read in two ways: ‘now I know. . .
what rough beast’ and 'what rough beast?’. The question, though,
predominates, since even within the framework of Yeats’s System the
future is uncertain: the broad outline is inevitable, but the
‘particulars are the work of the Thirteenth
Cone or
cycle’,
which represents the divine (AV
B 302),
so that A
Visionitself
ends in a series of questions. Yeats therefore knows that this coming
is of a ‘rough beast’ (another echo of Revelation, see Rev 13),
that the beast’s hour has ‘come round at last’, the phrasing
indicating the cyclical nature of this hour, and that it slouches
towards Bethlehem, but still questions its nature. The word
‘Slouches’ adds to the sinister aura, with its precise, feline
blend of casualness and stalking, but despite the sensuousness of
this verb and of the ‘slow thighs’, the beast has not yet been
born into the physical world.
The
beast’s birth at Bethlehem links it to the birth of Jesus, but
Bethlehem is more a symbolic state than a geographical place (like
Blake’s Jerusalem, for instance). In the System of A
Vision,
Yeats indicates that the coming Avatar, or divine incarnation,
because it is antithetical will
be multiple rather than single, and he represents the classical
predecessor of Christ in a variety of ways. In one guise, the
counterpart is Oedipus, who ‘lay upon the eath at the middle point
between four sacred objects. . . and he sank down soul and
body into the earth. I would have him balance Christ who, crucified
standing up, went into the abstract sky soul and body. . . .’
(AV
B 29).
In the poem ‘Leda
and the Swan’ (also titled just ‘Leda’), however, he
sees the rape of Leda by Zeus in the form of a swan as the heroic
age’s key moment: ‘I imagine the annunciation that founded Greece
as made to Leda. . . .’ (AV
B 268).
It is the counterpart to the annunciation to Mary by the Holy Ghost,
represented by a dove, and he titles the section of A
Vision on historical
cycles ‘Dove or Swan’. Leda’s daughter, Helen,
precipitates the Trojan War and her other daughter, Clytemnestra,
kills her husband, Agamemnon: ‘A shudder in the loins engenders
there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon
dead’. It is a form of this classicalantithetical annunciation,
similar to that of the Swan but different, which will be repeated.
| The Second Coming | |
|---|---|
| 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 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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