Free Essays - The Second Coming :: Second Coming

The Second Coming The Second Coming reminds me of the Marabar Caves in A Passage to India because of the "disconnectedness" that is portrayed. The poem quickly begins: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre [cycle of history] The falcon cannot hear the falconer'; Here Yeats reminds us all about the cycle of life that is constantly in rebirth. Everything is constantly "turning" in a "widening gyre" and yet the "falcon cannot hear the falconer" Life is connected in the sense that it is constantly in motion, constantly "turning" and yet there exists this strange "disconnectedness" because nature "the falcon" is so far separated from mankind "the falconer" that it can no longer be called. I may be reading too much into this small passage but it really reminds me of Forster's Marabar Caves: "A tunnel eight feet long, five feet high, three feet wide, leads to a circular chamber about twenty feet in diameter. The arrangement occurs again and again throughout the group of hills, and this is all, this is a Marabar Cave. . . They are dark caves. . . there is little to see, and no eye to see it," (137) It doesn't matter how deep you get into the caves, it doesn't matter how many turns you follow because you end up in a cave that looks exactly like the one in the beginning. Even language cannot be understood well, everything amounted to "Boam." Nature changed the very language of mankind to "boam." Is Forster's caves a symbol of life as he saw it ? "Circular chambers" that "occur again and again." I may be totally wrong but the Caves remind me of the first two lines of The Second Coming. Yeats cry continues with: "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," The world is in disarray, nature has been separated from mankind due to the Industrial revolution and philosophical thought. Locke has shown us all that metaphysical entities, like nature, don't exist because it's not physical and thus able to be tested by scientific methods. At least in the Romantic era, mankind was connected with nature. In Wordsworth, Blake, and Keats we find a special connection with nature that is lost in Yeats. The Romantics understood the connection mankind has with nature and tried to amplify it with their prose and poetry.