Wednesday
I recently came across an interpretation of William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” that is getting me to rethink the poem. While I’ve written about liberals who believe that the Trumpian rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem as a bad thing (for instance, here and here), I didn’t consider that Yeats might actually be welcoming it as a necessary corrective to populist movements. According to political commentator Noah Berlatsky, whose Everything Is Horrible blog I read regularly, Yeats was an authoritarian who disliked liberal democracy, and his poem “is a lot closer to fascist propaganda than to any sort of antifascist statement.”
For a refresher, here’s the poem:
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 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?
Berlatsky says that Yeats here is channeling Christian apocalyptic thinking, which he has merged with “his own quasi-mystical notions about historical epochs or ‘gyres’—notions which he interpolated and bastardized from Nietzsche.” The spinning gyres that cannot (like the falcon) be called back are Christian and pagan (Celtic) morality. Looking back at the chaos of World War I, the influenza pandemic, and Irish civil unrest (he could also add the Bolshevik Revolution), Berlatsky says that Yeats “anticipates a reversal of the moral order—a shuffling off of the Christian status quo of mercy and love, and a birth of a harsher, more brutal status quo, ‘blank and pitiless as the sun.’”
Contrary to antifascist readings of the poem, Yeats thinks that “blank and pitiless” is necessary, as least as far as the unwashed masses are concerned. Put in our own terms, Yeats has more in common with those tech billionaires who fantasize about elite control rather than with Trump’s MAGA followers, who think that he cares about their material welfare. While a supporter of Irish nationalism, Yeats had an elitist nationalism in mind:
[A]s an Anglo-Irish intellectual, he feared the rise of a Catholic state, which he associated with what he saw as a debased and ignorant public linked to the “filthy modern tide” of capitalism and mass culture. In order to stem this danger, he embraced the fascist Irish Blueshirt movement, explaining that “I find myself constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes as the only end to our troubles.” He composed a marching song for the Blueshirts that included the line, “What’s equality? Muck in the yard!”
In another poem (“Under Ben Bulben”), Yeats uses the phrase, “base born products of base beds.” If he eventually broke with the Blueshirts, Berlatsky writes, it’s because they weren’t aristocratic and elitist enough:
When Yeats says “the best lack all intensity” he’s talking about people like himself—intellectuals, but also white men of elevated social standing, including the aristocracy and the wealthy. And “the worst” who are “full of passionate intensity” are the lower classes—those who should know their place, but have now slipped their hood and gone flying every which way.
Thus (and you hear this from some people who rationalize Trump’s crude brutality), what is needed is someone who will crack heads. Yeats, Berlatsky says,
is imagining the (fascist) backlash to left uprising—a fascist backlash which is frightening and bleak, but which is also in its way exhilarating. The reason that the final lines of the poem are so indelible and so often quoted is because they encourage you to (at least ambivalently) identify with the force of apocalypse—to embrace the coming reversal of morals as a perhaps regrettable, but nonetheless necessary rebuke to the rabble, the communists, the anarchists, the Catholics. Fascism will restore order and grandeur. The price might be high, but Yeats made it clear in his writings that he was willing to see it paid.
Berlatsky then turns to apocalyptic fantasies in general, which he notes often lean fascist as they generally involve “predictions of inevitable doom” from the point of view of one who knows. In that perspective there is an “implicit (or explicit) denigration of those who don’t.”
He therefore prefers antifascist apocalypse stories like N.K. Jemisin’s Broke Earth Trilogy (he could also have mentioned Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood), which “insist on portraying the choices not of rulers, but of those targeted for violence, discrimination, and death.” Antifascism, he notes,
requires solidarity, which means you can’t pump yourself up by preening as you contemplate everyone else’s death. And, relatedly, it requires a commitment to, and an assertion of, agency—not for one poet or one king or one prophet, but for everyone.
Because “The Second Coming” makes our encounter with Trump feel mythic, liberals who cite the poem mistakenly believe it’s helpful in our battle. Bertlasky, however, points out that Trump isn’t a myth but rather “a boring, grimy truth.” Since granting him world-historical inevitability “is just another fascist lie,” we shouldn’t look to the poem for antifascist insight or inspiration.
While I myself have used “The Second Coming” in this way, I’ve never had illusions about Yeats’s politics. Not only him but a number of the leading writers of this period (Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce) were attracted to fascism. This does not mean that we should reject their works, however. I think of how Marxist Terry Eagleton values them for the insights they provide into their time. “In the absence of genuinely revolutionary art,” he writes, “only a radical conservatism, hostile like Marxism to the withered values of liberal bourgeois society, could produce the most significant literature.”
To take an example closer to our own time, while Trump-supporting playwright David Mamet has appalling political views, his play Glengarry Glen Ross is a brilliant depiction of the emptiness of dog-eat-dog capitalism. The man David Mamet celebrates the brutal bro culture that his play exposes.
If nothing else, then, “The Second Coming” helps us understand why so many on the right are willing to countenance the violence we are witnessing in our cities and why some Christian nationalists view Trump as a Christ-like figure: our president appeals to a fantasy that he is a rough beast who will sweep away all uncertainty—no lack of conviction there—and usher in a new age.
The question is whether Trump’s opponents can respond with powerful myths of their own. Or are they just hoping to take electoral advantage of the disillusion that will set in once people realize, as they eventually realized with Mussolini and Hitler, the pain that invariably accompanies fascistic second comings?
How deep does their commitment go? Fortunately the people of Minnesota, who have been embodying the ideals found in “the Declaration of Independence, “the Gettysburg Address,” Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty, and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, are showing them the way.
