The Second Comming by William Butler Yeats

So, for my English III class we are required to do these close reads, where we use 'tools' given, or rather taught, to us to do just that, read closer into a given written piece. The following is a poem by a popular Irish poet, I am to 'close-read' it, as to relate it to our current class novel, Lord of the Flies. My close reading will be typed in thin italics.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

The Second Comming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Resembles the boys becoming saveage and unwilling to listen to any kind of leader
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
Simple things determine who is in charge, but is lost
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
A mere physical relation, blood is to Simon's murder
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
No one is innocent, everyone is going savage and rejects the idea they've done anything wrong
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
All the boys aren't caring they're becoming uncivilized while Ralph notices, it really gets to him and he hates it. He doesn't want him, or the others, to become savage. "The best lack all conviction" as in none of the others seeing what a big deal they way they're acting is.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Seems to be something a long the lines of being rescued.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand,
Since it troubles his sight, its like hope is lost, it more burdens him with the chances of being rescued worsening, than gives him hope with something a long the lines of a God
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blanke and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
These last for lines kind of resemble the boys' 'Inner Beast' as in a physical description sort of way.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
Sleep is hard to accomplish, hope is dying down and everyone is scared of this beast.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
When the beast becomes visible to them, when the beast shows itself to terrorize them, or maybe when they will be rescued and become civilized.



And that's the end of the poem and close read, I know that some of what I say might not make sense, that maybe I try to hard and try to make sense out of nothing, but that was my try and the most I could see in it. It definately got harder and harder to relate to LOTF as the poem went on.