Tutorial Presentation notes

The Second Coming

• World in chaos

• Begging for refuge from anarchy/apocalypse

• 1920, post WW1

• Repre. of chaos, disorder

• Cyclic natural order

• Critical wartime

• Closing of era?

• criticism of celebratory of war

• Reflecting on secularisation, critic. to war

• Dominant modernist attitudes, set in post war society

Circular motifs

• Gyre turning

• Falcon's flight

• Centre

• Society is chaotic, diverged from natural order

• Zoomorphism of anarchy

• Falconer - order, that we stray from

  • Falcon, symbol of domesticating nature?
  • Human control on nature is slipping

Context

Why is the world depicted as so chaotic? Context!!!

• WW1 ends

• Nationalism in Ireland

• Unified bloodshed, everyone loses?

• Futility of human life in war?

• Irony in moving on (???)

• Dismissive of the important of the war's tragedy

• Oxymoronic, why are the best being equal to those without conviction? (contradictory)

• Questioning the objectivity of the moral standing which caused the war.

  • How do we justify the war morally?

• Alt: Allegorical with leaders, they lack conviction because they can't possible relate to the soldier's perspective in war.

The Second Coming?! (title)

What does the second coming mean?

• 2nd coming of Christ, book of revelations
• Final judgement, for souls going to hell/heaven

2nd stanza is heavily based on the bible

• Note that Yates was Irish protestant.

Divine intervention?

2nd stanza - religious alusions and intertextuality

Spiritus Mundi - spirit of the world

• Can either be a spirit that gives life to all, or an object which the world mimics, i.e. Plato's ideas

Is this the world order, ruling over us?

• Jarring imaging, zoomorphism blended with personification. Off-putting? Similar to the book of revelations (dragon, anti-Christ, false prophet). Fear the beast?

Sphinx and religion

• Unyielding nature of sphinx, an unconquerable beast (That humanity cannot over come)

  • We cannot control nature

• Draws parallels between the sphinx and Jesus?

• Secular depiction, its lethargic, not glorious.

• Ominous

• Bird metaphorical of humanity, described as shadow. Phys. char. not mentioned. $\implies$ Futility of humanity?

  • Indignant response to the spirit coming down, a refusal of religion - secularised position conveyed

Human consequences

• Vex - suffering, cradle - safety?

The world is a cradle rocked too far?

• At last - inevitable
• Beast parallel to anti-Christ, the antithesis of creation, returning to the place of beginning (Bethlehem), cyclical ending to the world, ending where it begins

Modernism and summary

• Existentialism

• Critical attitudes toward war

• Caution towards human progress

• Instability in current systems

O sweet spontaneous

Summary

• 1931 post ww1 America
• Inspiration from Symbolism movement (19th century)
• Nature is mysterious, spontaneous entity, humanity cannot grasp

Whole analysis

• Disjointed free-verse structure
• Extended metaphor, Earth is a woman being sexually assaulted by 'men' (philosophy, science, religion)
• Old English - our treatment is archaic, and has been occuring for a while

Reading 1

• Extended metaphor of philosophy detrimental to Earth

  • Criticise anthropocentric ideals, and philosophical attitudes, in favour of pragmatism
  • Criticise secularisation, encourages faith in Christianity
  • Sibilance, alliteration, reverent tone
  • Affectionate
  • Negative connotations, symbolic
  • Unpleasant diction, harsh consonance

• Fundamentalism, pentacostalism, both were counter cultures to the secularised ideals of modernism

• scraggy knees - people believe Christianity is declining

• squeezing and buffeting - forcing itself onto people, opposing secularism

• Science innovations allowed greater scale of destruction and combat

• Natural resources of Earth were being exploited more

• Staircase enjambment, like strip mining!

• Plosive alliteration

• thumb: green thumb? but also refers to soldiers in war, their thumbs were used to operate weapons

Reading 2

• Cyclical nature of life and death, endorsing secularisation

• Although humanity tries to control nature, it continues and renews itself

• Rhythmic lover: the periodic embrace of death

• Loss of purpose?

• If life is cyclical, then death is less final, individual life is less significant

  • Loss of purpose caused from increased secularisation

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

• Charac. of modernist literature

  • Themes of isolation, absurdity
    • Subservience to new systems of industrialism, people are no longer connected
    • Feeling disoriented with change, lack of connection to nature which prevailed before Ind.R.
  • Free verse
    • Deviation of sonnet structure
    • Previous schools of literature were disillusioned with the truth of what society should be aiming for
    • Rejection of mankind's willingness to conform to systems
  • Fragmentation
  • Stream of Consciousness

• Causes

  • Industrialism
    • More cramped cities, loss of identity/sense of community
    • Technology enables further violence in war
  • War, WW1, Russian Revolution
  • Rejection of religion

• Inspirations

  • Ezra Pound
    • Imagist, promotes clear, precise language
    • Objective correlative theory, for people to convey ideas, should be a situation, environment alongside objects being conveyed
  • Henri Bergson
    • Believed in continuity of life, individuals must be free, and able to express oneself

• Different imagery in the poem (very lengthy)

• Stream of Consciousness style

• Theme of humanity changing the face of the Earth

Plot overview

• Loss of identity
  • Concerned with the surreal, lost physical connection to reality
  • The world is devoid of meaning, lacking community/connection, imagery of decay/degradation
• Social, moral decay
  • Trauma, stress on the population
  • Immorality, prostitution, objectification of women
  • Deviation from traditional values was meaningless (???). It was futile

Preludes

• Represent city as filthy, urban alienation

• Monotony of human life

• Life is futile

• Pre-WW1

  • Industralisation, urbanisation on the rise

• World was sinful, sullen, according to Eliot

• Preludes - short piece introduce performance

  • This poem introduces more broad modernist themes?

"burnt out ends of smoky days"

• People are burnt out

• Visual - foul imagery

• Sibilance

• Reaction to Romanticism?

• Morning is associated to olfactory imagery of beer?

  • Challenging romantic view that life is cheerful, is actually miserable
  • Person. of morning, dehumanising?

• Feet - synecdoche

• "time resumes" time is restarting, each day begins similarly, indistinguishable

• "all the hands" hands of a clock? the slow march of time

• Polysyndeton of hand - rigid structure of daily life

  • Words do not match, just meaningless commands

• Allusion to 'The Leper'

• "sparrows in gutters" - waste and neglect, in contrast to the sparrow as a symbol of beauty

• harshness of urban society hides the inner beauty of people

• allusion to Christianity, his Christian perspective

  • Can this lifestyle be redeemed?
  • "fade behind a city block" hope is obstructed

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

• Manipulate romantic rhapsody, viginet of modernist anxiety

• Modern urban scape - senseless?

  • Disrepair

• Modernist conventions:

• Past tense but lamp speaks in present

• Rhapsody actually had a lack of structure - irregular, free-flowing

• Street lamp motif

  • Scaffold coherent structure
  • Time, delivered by lamp
  • Fatalistic drum - automatic, urban life?
  • 19th century - 1/4 live in city,

• Mundanity of midnight stroll

  • Bergsonian philosophy !! :)

• Time motif

  • Bergson: midnight is when yesterday, tomorrow combine in a fluid nature
  • Clock time has no logic for existence?

• Motif of memory

  • Twisted romantic metaphor of the paper rose, mockery of red flower
  • The funny moon thing: Moon holds no grudges
  • Who does "The reminiscence comes"? It is left ambiguous, because omision of a pronoun/definite article
  • Memory is harder to locate in an industrialising society

• Mundane experience, shoes at the door, sleep, 日常生活

• Mechanical existence, shift from idealism of Romantic poetry

• Disillusionment with clock time

Final thoughts

• Draws in bergsonian philosphy within modernist anxieties
• Scrutinise facts of soceity

After Apple-picking

• Pastoral poem

• Reflection on day of apple-picking, mental/physical fatigue

• Selective picking apples, what happens to the others?

• Existential exploration of unaccomplished desires, from mundane laborious life

• Morality, discontent, isolation, escaping reality

  • Escape through fantasy?

• Troubles aspect of human condition, modernist disillusionment

• Allusion become more crucial in modernist poetry

• Alienation of individual

• Fragmented worldviews emerging

• Produces at crossroads between Romanticism and Modernism

• Stream of consciousness as persona falls asleep

• Allusion to book of Genesis

• Passive verbs, and the persona is fixated on his work, on his labor

• Shift between reliving, reminiscing.

• Over-analysis of the past

• Enjambed structure, fleeting size, falling asleep

• A bit of internal rhyme, alongside vivid immersive imagery, thus euphonic nature?

all nearness pauses, while a star can grow...

• Reading: shaped by existentialism, death gives value and meaning to life?

  • Loss and grief isn't purely chaos, it gives hope and makes life meaningful

• Existentialism: The world has no meaning, one must create their own

• Breathing - living, pausing - death?

• Euphonic consonance, associations with the sublime.

• Juxtaposition of neither and both, sense of dislocation with space/time. Sense of vastness for the universe

• Liminality that emerged from WW2, and the existential questions it induced

• Euphonic tone, moon is vast and beautiful

• Visual imagery of the moon, associated with gold, representing success/wealth/elegance

• Utopian peace

• Neo-romantic to serious tone

• Time is generous, in his giving and taking of life

• Death is inevitable

• Oxymoronic "strange fellow".

• Love is transcendental, exceeds life or death

• Ends on 'begin', cyclical nature, the end is not the end but the beginning

  • Paradoxical? Subverts death being final

Structure

• Sonnet-ish
  • Some rules are subverted
• Leans towards free-verse poetry
  • Typical of Modernist poetry, to reject the traditional methods from pre-WW2.

Space and time

• Time is personified, giving it agency, depicted as active force that shakes society, individuals, etc.
• Cosmic imagery, reader is left feeling insignificant
• Contrasted by euphonic phrases that give hope and beauty

Nature

• Natural imagery is prevalent
  • Appreciate small moments in life
  • Romantic/transcendentalist belief
• Stars, moon, symbols of immortality/love
  • Repetition $\implies$ timelessness

Loss and gain

• Cyclical nature of life and death
  • Confronting the reality of death allows people to re-analyse their lives

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