A few rough beasts

Slouching

Let’s start at the end. That always determines the beginning. Yes, the rough beasts allude to Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” (and later, David Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes/Carry the News,” sort of). Yeats’s poem has snagged some­thing in the collective imagination with oft-quoted lines such as “the centre cannot hold” and “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” The poem contains so much that it’s worth repeating here: 

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?

W B Yeats (1865–1939) wrote the poem in January 1919 and it was first pub­lished in 1920. This situates it within the context of his 1925 work, A Vision, a complex description of the rhythms of historical cycles, extensively revised in 1937. Of it, he said, “I dare say I delude myself in thinking this book is my book of books”.¹ It was the product of his wife Georgie’s auto­matic writing beginning in 1917. Yeats spent over ten years elaborating the material and said it provided him with the impetus and security for his later work. 

More poetic and allusive than exact regarding dates, A Vision deals with historical periods of 1050 years or about 2,200 years, marked by gyres (thus the opening line of the poem) which are cones or vortices of increasing or decreasing in­fluence. (In Aion Jung also wrote about the same rhythms of time of the Piscean age).² As each gyre wanes so the opposite or antitheti­cal gyre waxes. With regard to the current gyre, beginning around the birth of Christ, Yeats suggests that this will give way in the near future to the second coming not of Christ but of his antithetical opposite. Neil Mann writes, “Yeats also portrays the antithetical Messiah as Oedipus, ‘an image from Homer’s age,’ who lay down upon the earth and ‘sank down soul and body into the earth. I would have him balance Christ who, crucified standing up, went into the abstract sky soul and body.’”³ Although moon cycles, aeons and gyres describe the great arche­typal rhythms of time, to explore them here would take us too far from our theme.

1. Letter from W. B. Yeats to T. Werner Laurie, July 27, 1924.

2. I elaborate on these rhythms of time in Owen Jung and the Moon Cycles (2002) and in The Maya Book of Life (2011).

3. “W. B. Yeats and ‘A Vision’: The Historical Cycles.” www.yeatsvi­sion.com/History.html