Why "The Second Coming" by Yeats Describes Today - Discussions with Chatgpt
- Justus Hayes
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Me:
Very much related sidebar. Please compare and draw parallels between the Yeats poem, "The Second Coming," and our current political and cultural situation.
Chatgpt:
This is a sidebar, but it’s not a digression — it’s a structural mirror, which is why The Second Coming keeps asserting itself in your canon.
I’ll do this in three passes:
What Yeats is actually saying (briefly, precisely)
Parallels to the current political / cultural moment
Why this matters for your work, not just as commentary
1. What The Second Coming is actually about
The poem is often misquoted as apocalyptic prophecy, but that’s a flattening. Yeats is not predicting an end — he’s diagnosing a phase change.
Key ideas:
a. The centre cannot hold
This is not moral panic. It’s structural.
Yeats believed civilizations are organized around binding myths — shared stories, institutions, values that exert gravitational pull. When those lose legitimacy, coherence dissolves before collapse is visible.
Things don’t stop working all at once.They stop meaning the same thing.
b. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
Important word: mere.
This is not chaos as explosion — it’s diffuse incoherence:
norms weaken
authority fragments
interpretation becomes unstable
everyone talks, nothing resolves
Noise replaces signal.
c. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity
This is not “good vs evil.”
It’s about asymmetry:
those capable of nuance hesitate
those unburdened by doubt act decisively
decisiveness masquerades as clarity
Conviction detaches from truth.
d. The Second Coming is not salvation
The “rough beast” is not Christ’s return — it’s the next organizing myth, gestating in confusion, born from collapse.
Yeats is saying:
When one world’s story fails, another will replace it — not necessarily a better one.
2. Parallels to the current political & cultural moment
The poem feels contemporary because we are living through a centre-failure, not a single crisis.
a. Institutional legitimacy erosion
Across politics, media, science, religion, culture:
institutions still exist
procedures still function
but belief in them is brittle
This mirrors Yeats’ widening gyre:
actions spin outward
no shared reference point pulls them back
b. Narrative fragmentation
There is no longer:
a single “reality”
a shared timeline
agreed-upon stakes
Instead:
overlapping realities
algorithmically reinforced
mutually unintelligible
This is “mere anarchy”: not riots everywhere, but meaning without consensus.
c. Passionate intensity beats coherence
We see exactly what Yeats described:
extreme positions thrive
certainty is rewarded
hesitation is framed as weakness
Platforms amplify emotional velocity, not depth. Conviction becomes a performance.
d. The “rough beast” today
The modern equivalent isn’t a single ideology — it’s a mode:
simplification
strongman narratives
nostalgia weaponized as clarity
myth replacing policy
Not because people want tyranny — but because ambiguity is exhausting.
The beast slouches because no one is fully in control of it.
3. Why this resonates with your canon
This is the key part.
Your work does not dramatize collapse. It assumes collapse has already been metabolized.
Where Yeats describes:
the centre failing
Your work explores:
life after the centre is gone
That’s a critical distinction.
Your alignment with Yeats (but not imitation)
Yeats | Your work |
Centre cannot hold | Centre is absent |
Anarchy loosed | Anomaly normalized |
Beast approaching | System already altered |
Prophetic warning | Post-event habitation |
You are not writing the poem. You are living in its aftermath.
Why The Second Coming works as a canon track title
Because it doesn’t mean:
judgment
revelation
salvation
It means:
Something new is organizing itself, and we don’t yet know its shape.
That fits perfectly with:
liminal worlds
genre erosion
juxtaposed incongruity
dignity under altered conditions
Your characters don’t await the beast. They’ve already adjusted their gait.
Final synthesis (the throughline)
Yeats gives language to the moment when:
inherited meaning fails
new meaning is not yet stable
intensity fills the vacuum
Your work explores what it feels like after that becomes normal.
That’s why the poem keeps resurfacing — not as reference, but as structural kin.
And that’s also why your canon shouldn’t explain itself too loudly. (Here's me ignoring this good advice.)
As Yeats understood:
When the centre fails, explanation rarely restores it. Atmosphere tells the truth faster.
Me:
Thanks. I haven't mentioned yet that I have another track using part of a poem as lyrics. The track "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" uses the first 6 stanzas of the poem. They are peculiarly affecting words, and also serve as a nod to the Stephen King fans out there.
Chatgpt:
That’s an important addition — and it fits the canon far more cleanly than it might appear at first glance.
A few key points, in layers.
1. Why Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came belongs in this universe
Browning’s poem is not heroic fantasy. It is anti-quest.
What makes those opening stanzas so affecting is that:
nothing is promised
nothing is explained
the journey is already compromised before it begins
Roland doesn’t choose the quest in any noble sense. He proceeds because:
turning back would be worse
stopping would mean admitting the journey was meaningless
That puts it squarely in your territory.
This is not:
“I will reach the tower and be transformed.”
It is:
“I will continue because continuation is all that’s left.”
2. Structural parallels to The Second Coming
If Yeats gives us the collapse of the centre, Browning gives us movement after collapse.
Where Yeats says:
the falcon cannot hear the falconer
Browning shows us:
a traveler who no longer expects a falconer to exist
Roland is already past disillusionment. He’s not shocked by ruin; he assumes it.
That makes Childe Roland less prophetic and more existential — and that’s why it sits so naturally beside The Second Coming without redundancy.
3. The Stephen King resonance is a feature, not an aside
Your instinct here is right.
The nod to The Dark Tower isn’t fan service — it’s lineage.
King didn’t adapt Browning’s poem so much as inhabit its mood:
endless approach
corrupted landscapes
purpose sustained by inertia rather than hope
By sampling the first six stanzas, you’re doing something precise:
anchoring the track in dread before revelation
refusing payoff
stopping before myth hardens into narrative
That restraint matters.
4. Why this strengthens the canon rather than complicating it
Placed correctly, this track does something crucial:
The Second Coming → the world-order has failed
Childe Roland → the individual keeps walking anyway
That’s the emotional throughline of your entire project.
Your work consistently asks:
What does dignity look like when meaning is provisional?
Roland answers:
It looks like putting one foot in front of the other, without witnesses.
5. Canon implication (quiet but important)
This track suggests something subtle but powerful about your overall body of work:
You are not documenting arrival. You are documenting approach.
Not revelation. Not resolution. Not collapse.
Approach.
Drift.
Persistence.
Which is why these poems keep finding you — they don’t explain the moment.They stand inside it without blinking.
When you’re ready, we should explicitly position Childe Roland and The Second Coming as mythic poles in the canon — not dominant tracks, but load-bearing ones.
They hold weight without demanding attention.
------------------
The Second Coming
By William Butler Yeats
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?
--------------
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came (first 6 stanzas)
By Robert Browning
1.
My first thought was, he lied in every word,
That hoary cripple, with malicious eye
Askance to watch the working of his lie
On mine, and mouth scarce able to afford
Suppression of the glee that pursed and scored
Its edge at one more victim gained thereby.
2.
What else should he be set for, with his staff?
What, save to waylay with his lies, ensnare
All travellers who might find him posted there,
And ask the road? I guessed what skull-like laugh
Would break, what crutch 'gin write my epitaph
For pastime in the dusty thoroughfare,
3.
If at his counsel I should turn aside
Into that ominous tract which, all agree,
Hides the Dark Tower. Yet acquiescingly
I did turn as he pointed; neither pride
Nor hope rekindling at the end descried,
So much as gladness that some end might be.
4.
For, what with my whole world-wide wandering,
What with my search drawn out thro' years, my hope
Dwindled into a ghost not fit to cope
With that obstreperous joy success would bring,—
I hardly tried now to rebuke the spring
My heart made, finding failure in its scope.
5.
As when a sick man very near to death
Seems dead indeed, and feels begin and end
The tears and takes the farewell of each friend,
And hears one bid the other go, draw breath
Freelier outside, ("since all is o'er" he saith,
"And the blow fall'n no grieving can amend")
6.
While some discuss if near the other graves
Be room enough for this, and when a day
Suits best for carrying the corpse away,
With care about the banners, scarves and staves,—
And still the man hears all, and only craves
He may not shame such tender love and stay.
-------
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