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The New York Times - Feb 12, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/opinion/12mon4.html

Editorial Observer

What W. B. Yeats's Second Coming Really Says About the Iraq War

By ADAM COHEN

The Brookings Institution, the prominent Washington research organization,
just released a report on the Iraq war entitled Things Fall Apart. When
Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, took to the House
floor last year to demand that President Bush present a plan for Iraq, he
called his speech The Center Cannot Hold. Blogs are full of the observation
that the blood-dimmed tide is loosed in Iraq these days.

These phrases all come from William Butler Yeatss Second Coming. Yeatss
bleakly apocalyptic poem has long been irresistible to pundits. What
historical era, after all, is not neatly summed up by his lament that The
best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity?
But with its somber vision of looming anarchy, and its Middle Eastern
backdrop (the terrifying beast Yeats warns of slouches towards Bethlehem),
The Second Coming is fast becoming the official poem of the Iraq war.

The pundits who quote it, though, are picking up on Yeatss words, but not
his world view. As Helen Vendler, the great Harvard poetry scholar, and
others have pointed out, The Second Coming is really two poems. The first
eight lines are filled with the pointed aphorisms that pundits like so
much, while the rest of the poem suggests the unpredictability of how
history will unfold. This second, less quoted part is the one that speaks
most directly to the grim situation in Iraq.

Yeats wrote The Second Coming in 1919, an especially dismal moment in
history. Europeans were shell-shocked from World War I, and deeply cynical.
Yeatss homeland, Ireland, was lurching toward civil war. The old order in
Russia had just been toppled by a revolution that Yeats who had a fondness
for aristocracy feared would spread across the continent and the globe.

Yeatss perspective on the worlds troubles was not what many people who
quote him today might suspect. For one thing, he was not a Christian. He
dabbled in theosophy and the occult, and considered Christianity an idea
whose time had passed. The Second Coming is not, as its title and the
Bethlehem reference might suggest, an account of the return of the Messiah.
What is being born is nothing resembling Christ.

As for his politics, Yeats was hardly a democrat, and he did not care much
for progress which makes him an odd choice for people who hope to turn Iraq
into a vibrant democracy. Yeats was attracted to fascism, and he rebelled
as a youth against the adults talk of progress by embracing its opposite. I
took satisfaction in certain public disasters, felt sort of ecstasy at the
contemplation of ruin, he once wrote.

The first eight lines of The Second Coming, as Ms. Vendler notes, are the
philosophical part of the poem. A rational, thinking observer a pundit, of
sorts is describing the world in definite, if foreboding, terms. The falcon
cannot hear the falconer paints a vivid image of the natural order coming
apart. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world describes an onslaught of
destruction almost matter-of-factly.

But after those eight lines, the poem suddenly becomes, as Ms. Vendler
notes, oracular. Like the Delphic oracle, this Yeats speaks cryptically.
Surely the Second Coming is at hand, he says but of course, surely here
means its opposite: what follows is not certain at all. Yeats goes on to
announce somewhere in sands of the desert/ A shape with lion body and the
head of a man an indefinite creature in an indefinite place.

The poem reflects, as Harold Bloom, the Yale professor and literary critic,
says, Yeatss belief that a change in god was coming, and that the
2,000-year reign of Christianity was about to end. But it does not reveal
who this god will be. Its last two lines are a question: And what rough
beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Second Coming is a powerful brief against punditry. The Christian era
was about the ability to predict the future: the New Testament clearly
foretold the second coming of Christ. In the post-Christian era of which
Yeats was writing there was no Bible to map out what the next coming would
be. The world would have to look toward Bethlehem to see what rough beast
arrived.

This skepticism about predicting the future has more relevance to the Iraq
war than any of the poems much-quoted first eight lines. The story of the
Iraq war is one of confident predictions that never came to pass: We will
find weapons of mass destruction; we will be greeted as liberators; the
insurgency is in its last throes.

The confident predictors who have been wrong in the past do not hesitate to
keep offering up plans. That is true of President Bush, certainly: he talks
about what his troop surge will do as if he had never been wrong before. It
is also true of the pundits. The co-author of Things Fall Apart, the
Brookings guide to going forward in Iraq, is Kenneth Pollack, who is
incredibly best known for his 2002 book The Threatening Storm: The Case for
Invading Iraq.

It is bizarre to see shards of The Second Coming appended to the Brookings
report, or to any of the other plans and prognostications about the war in
Iraq. Yeats, who grew up feeling sort of ecstasy at the contemplation of
ruin, did not just welcome whatever new order his rough beast was ushering
in. He believed the only way it could plausibly be spoken of was in the
form of a question.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

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