This blog is a response to the blog task ssigned by Dr. Dilip Barad sir. This blog is dealing with two poems of W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’ and ‘On Being Asked For War Poem’.

W.B.Yeats Poem

W.B.Yeats

Born in Dublin, Ireland, on June 13, 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London. He returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen to continue his education and study painting, but quickly discovered he preferred poetry. Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage. Though Yeats never learned Irish Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore. Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from Yeat, she remained a powerful figure in his poetry.

The Second Coming

"The Second Coming" is one of W.B. Yeats's most famous poems. Written in 1919 soon after the end of World War I, it describes a deeply mysterious and powerful alternative to the Christian idea of the Second Coming—Jesus's prophesied return to the Earth as a savior announcing the Kingdom of Heaven.

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence in January 1919, that followed the Easter Rising in April 1916, 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.

 Today when we are facing Corona Pandemic we are pulled to read literary works with pandemic insight, till day we used to study same texts but never read it through pandemic sight as we never faced it or it was not in our memory.

Elizabeth Outka in her text ‘Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature’ (2019) explains a bit about the authors who addressed pandemic in their work. Outka looked closely at the works of Eliot, Woolf and Yeats who have experienced Flu in person. In this blog we will read W.B. Yeats poem The Second Coming with pandemic insight with reference to Elizabeth Outka’s book ‘Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature’.

Yeats wrote this poem when his wife was recovering. Looking at this biographical element we can interpret this poem to be a pandemic poem, it is definitely a war poem but we also find Influenza effect recorded in this poem.

On being Asked for 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. Before we analyse ‘On Being Asked for a War Poem’, here’s a reminder of the text of the poem.

critical analysis of poem

This poem is a contradictory poem, it has an act of refusal-as-assent. It consists of an air of irony, the poet himself is asking poet’s to be silent and he himself is writing it through poem.

In a letter of the same year, sent to John Quinn, Yeats wrote that the First World War was ‘merely the most expensive outbreak of insolence and stupidity the world has ever seen and I give it as little thought as I can.’

 Let's apply Indian Poetics concept in this two western poems.

On Being Asked for War poem

• According to Kuntaka’s Vakrokti theory, the poem has a Vakrokti element in “On being asked for a war poem’ cause of refusal-as- assent in the poem. Specifically Prakaran Vakrokti.

• According to Bharat’s rasa theory, we find Adbhutam originated from (amazement and wonder) rasa in it.

The Second Coming

• According to Bhamaha’s Alankar theory, ‘A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,’ we find upama alankara
• According to Kuntaka’s theory of Vakrokti, The imagery of lion’s body and man’s head and rebirth of god seems ironic, which is not possible in real life.
• Auchitya is also found as it is a symmetric poem.

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