Much of my research intersects with issues around modernism. When I get into discussions with people about what I do, I am often asked what modernism is. Answer: I don't really know. In fact, I have sometimes been surprised by the people who have asked me--since I was about to ask them what they thought modernism might be. I suspect, that if modernism is anything, then it is this poem "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats:William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?
(1919)
That line in the first stanza "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold" is archetypical of all things modern. I just saw a NOVA program about dark matter. It explained how when a central body is not strong enough gravitationally, the objects around it are able to fly away. This, I think is central motive (if you will excuse the pun) around which modernism rotates: that the things we would like to trust in life --governments, God, our parents-- often aren't strong enough to provide stability in a world that transforms itself too quickly for us to adapt. Certainly this is how Yeats must have felt when faced with the one-two punch of the first World War and the Spanish flu epidemic when so many lost their lives.
The poem makes clear christian references, yet the god of his second coming seems to be an amalgamation of greek and egyptian mythology. Nothing is as it ought to be, nothing makes sense. The poem leaves me empty of everything but respect and awe for Yeat's imagery. Even for those who haven't lost their religion like Yeats or maybe REM,I think this poem creates images that ring true for most people. The ever-widening gyre of the falcon or the beast slouching toward Jerusalem--both connote the increasing uncertainty that we all have to confront if we are to make it.
The second question, of course, is always what is post-modernism? Answer: the center cannot hold, but I am ok with that.
(Picture is The Widening Gyre, by Emily Tellez)
