Eliot and Yeats: Be Anxious for... Everything

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All of us are thinking this right now. We're all trying to process it and make some sense of it. So I'll go ahead and say it: what in the absolute heck did I just read?

"The Waste Land" didn't make sense. It was confusing. But in the midst of the muddled mess, one theme came shining through clearly: absolute anxiety. There's something that obviously has the narrator on edge throughout the entire work; visions of hooded specters and accusations of burying bodies indoor garden will do that to you. Even the bartender's repetitive warning of "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME" carries a foreboding air when it's just an innocent message. The confusing structure of the narrative only made the anxiety more tangible for me as the reader-- it was what I could pick up and focus on more than anything else.

Yeats' poem left a very similar impression on me. I get the feeling that his idea of a Second Coming isn't about Christ righting the wrongs of the world. We can get into the eschatology of "mere anarchy" and its obvious place in the Book of Revelation later. At the moment I'm more concerned with Spiritus Mundi, this idea that the earth itself is angry and unleashing a dreadful, slow-marching chaos on mankind in the form of the Sphinx. That part is... less than biblical. This isn't the Bible story Christians look forward to. This is something ominous.

P.S. I commented on Brenna and Tobias' posts.

Comments

  1. Ethan LafontJanuary 15, 2018 at 3:02 PM

    I really felt the same uneasiness while reading Yeats' poem. It seems like Yeats saw humans as their own worst enemy, which I would agree, and the world (Spirtitus Mundi) around us is stepping in to fight back against the evil.

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  2. Natalie SchulerJanuary 15, 2018 at 3:33 PM

    Anxiety is a good word for this poem; you really can see it throughout both works actually. The part about "Second Coming" being Biblical is also right; I could definitely see Revelation in it.

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  3. Brenna StringfellowJanuary 15, 2018 at 6:31 PM

    I agree with you it was straight confusion. That bartender's repetition on "Hurry up it's time" straight up messed with me. It is such an innocent phrase, yet it gives so much uneasiness. In "The Second Coming", I agree the Earth has somewhat lost its mind and has gone crazy.

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  4. Zelda PeachJanuary 15, 2018 at 8:45 PM

    I really like what you said on The Second Coming. You are completely right that there is a sense of dread towards this coming, not a longing for it's return. I feel like the whole poem is blaming man for his constant war on himself. Even if despair is not there right now, it is always coming a second time.

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