Thinking Activity:On Being Asked for War poem,and The Second Coming by W.B.Yeats

 Introduction : 

William Butler Yeats is widely considered to one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.

William Butler Yeats born on June 13,1865, Sandymount,Dublin,Ireland- died on January 28,1939, Roquebrune - cap - Martin,France. He was Irish poet, dramatist, and prose writer,One of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923.

Notable Works : 

“A Vision” • “At the Hawk’s Well” • “Cathleen ni Houlihan” • “Easter 1916” • “Four Plays for Dancers” • “Last Poems and Two Plays” • “Leda and the Swan” • “Responsibilities: Poems and a Play” • “Sailing to Byzantium” • “The Celtic Twilight” • “The Countess Cathleen” • “The Green Helmet” • “The Herne’s Egg” • “The Second Coming” • “The Tower” • “The Wanderings of Oisin, and Other Poems” • “The Wild Swans at Coole” • “The Winding Stair”

Evaluate 'On Being Asked for a War Poem '

‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’ is a poem by W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), written in 1915 and published the following year. It’s one of Yeats’s shortest well-known poems, comprising just six lines, and sets out why Yeats chooses not to write a ‘war poem’ for publication.

Original Poem : 

"On being asked for a War Poem" is a poem by William Butler Yeats written on February 6, 1915 in response to a request by Henry James that Yeats compose a political poem about World War I. Yeats changed the poem's title from "To a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neutral nations" to "A Reason for Keeping Silent" before sending it in a letter to James, which Yeats wrote at Coole Park on August 20, 1915. 

The poem was prefaced with a note stating: "It is the only thing I have written of the war or will write, so I hope it may not seem unfitting." The poem was first published in Edith Wharton's The Book of the Homeless in 1916 as "A Reason for Keeping Silent". When it was later reprinted in The Wild Swans at Coole, the title was changed to "On being asked for a War Poem".

About poem :

There is something of a contradiction to this poem; in a war poetry collection, it is a poem that refuses to speak about war. The poem says that it is not the place of a poet to write about politics, but that the poet instead should limit his interference in the world to pleasing his companions. The poem is written in iambic pentameter,rhymed abcabc.

The opening statement is forthright and conversational about “times like these”, or times of war- the enjambment, or running over the end of line, mimics everyday speech. When the poet writes of “a poet’s mouth” being silent, he is using a technique called metonymy. Like metaphor, metonymy substitutes one thing for another. Metaphor does this by contrasting different things (“He was an animal”) but in metonymy, something closely related to something else is substituted. For example: “the crown” may refer to the Queen or royalty, or “the press” may to refer to the newspapers. Both are closely connected. Here, the “poet’s mouth” represents (because it speaks) his poetry.

A statesman is a political leader. Here, it is asserted that poets have no “gift”, or ability, to tell statesman how they should make decisions. This seems to say that poetry has no place in intervening in politics, and the poet no role in making big statements about wars and what causes them. Note the semi-colon: this opening statement about the world in the macrocosm ends here.

Another word for interfering. This key word in the poem gives us a hint of the poet’s attitude to those who try and write activist or political poems: they are ‘meddlers’, troublesome interferers. The tone is obviously negative. “Meddling” in the lives of old men and young girls carries a lighter and happier tone however- a sense of play.

A quick change in imagery and reference point, from the macrocosm to the microcosm, from the world of politics to the world of intimate acquaintances. The new scene is lazy (“indolence”), relaxed, one of beauty (“youth”) and innocence.

This completes the scope of the poet’s influence. Does this mean that poetry is suited to everyday lessons and life? That the poet’s role is to appeal to beauty and wisdom, youth and age? These certainly seem narrower limits to the role of poetry than ‘setting statesmen right’. Yeats, however, would surely argue that poetry’s concerns are higher than political contingency.

“The Second Coming”

"The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet W.B.Yeats in 1919,first printed in The Dial in November 1920,and afterwards included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and second Coming to allegorically describe atmosphere of post-war Europe. It is considered a major work of modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. 

Historical Context :

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the first World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence that followed the Easter Rising at a time before the British Government decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland. Yeats used the phrase "the second birth "instead of "The Second Coming "in his first drafts.

 The poem is also connected to the 1918-1919 flu pandemic; In the weeks preceding Yeats’s writing of the poem. His pregnant wife Georgie Hyde-Less caught the virus and was very close to death. The highest death rates of the pandemic were among pregnant women- in some areas, they had up to a 70 percent death rate. While his wife was convalescing, he wrote "The Second".

Click here for read Original Poem - The Second Coming

About poem : 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening “gyre” (spiral), cannot hear the falconer; “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”; anarchy is loosed upon the world; “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The best people, the speaker says, lack all conviction, but the worst “are full of passionate intensity.”

Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” No sooner does he think of “the Second Coming,” then he is troubled by “a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx (“A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun”) is moving, while the shadows of desert birds reel about it. 

The darkness drops again over the speaker’s sight, but he knows that the sphinx’s twenty centuries of “stony sleep” have been made a nightmare by the motions of “a rocking cradle.” And what “rough beast,” he wonders, “its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

Form : 

“The Second Coming” is written in a very rough iambic pentameter, but the meter is so loose, and the exceptions so frequent, that it actually seems closer to free verse with frequent heavy stresses. The rhymes are likewise haphazard; apart from the two couplets with which the poem opens, there are only coincidental rhymes in the poem, such as “man” and “sun.”

Examples :

Contagion

When Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns to Minnesota from a Hong Kong business trip, she attributes the malaise she feels to jet lag. However, two days later, Beth is dead, and doctors tell her shocked husband (Matt Damon) that they have no idea what killed her. Soon, many others start to exhibit the same symptoms, and a global pandemic explodes. Doctors try to contain the lethal microbe, but society begins to collapse as a blogger (Jude Law) fans the flames of paranoia.

Virus 

A real life account of the deadly Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala, and the courageous fight put on by several individuals which helped to contain the epidemic.

Based on real events during the 2018 NIPAH Virus outbreak in Kerala. The plot is set in Kozhikode and follows the various stages of the epidemic from identification to its total annihilation. It portrays heroic moments that helped in effectively controlling the Virus from spreading further. The film explores the collective paranoia created by the Virus outbreak and how it disrupted the life of individuals, both victims and health care professionals. The saga of a group of brave people who stood up in the face of adversity, risking their own lives, fighting with all their will.

Reading for Pandemic: Viral Modernismby Elizabeth Outka, 

COVID-19, like previous outbreaks of infectious disease at the turn of the twenty-first century,has reawakened interest in the 1918–1919 Spanish influenza pandemic. As we wrestle with theunknowns and strive to contain the spread of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the1918–1919 influenza pandemic operates as a poignant benchmark; how do morbidity, mor-tality, and case fatality rates of COVID-19 and Spanish flu compare? What can the publichealth response to the flu—or lack thereof—teach us about social distancing measures in thepresent? Does the Spanish flu’s seasonal waves foretell similar, cyclical resurgences ofCOVID-19? When will it be safe to lift social distancing measures without seeing a resurgencelike that observed in flu cases in 1918–1919?

In Viral Modernism,Outka“flip the era’s centralmodernism is often characterized by fragmentation and experimentation: discon-certing, stream-of-consciousness narratives imbued with myth and mourning and cynicism. Itis typically understood as a response to the untold violence of World War I and rapidtechnological advances at the turn of the century—innovations which, in turn, enabled aruthlessly efficient model of industrial and scientific warfare. In short, WWI is conventionallyunderstood as the central trauma of the modernist era. But the tremendous loss of life andlingering aftereffects of the pandemic must have been formatively traumatic for the “LostGeneration”of artists and authors, as well, Outka insists. This is a deceptively simple assertionbecause,or switching our lens—it requires anew microscope.

References :

https://interestingliterature.com/2020/06/wb-yeats-being-asked-war-poem-analysis/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_being_asked_for_a_War_Poem

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-butler-yeats/the-second-coming

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)

Words Count - 1716