Which rough beast

It continues by emphasising the scope of the crisis The best, at least, lack the conviction to act. One is "full" while the other "lack[s]". One thinks but does not act, while the other acts but does not think.

Society is beset by chaos, as represented by imagery of "The blood-dimmed tide" and, especially, animals imagery laden with negative connotations: "rough beast", "indignant dessert birds", and the errant falcon.

The worst give in to their primitive urges and themselves become agents of chaos. The second stanza begins with the persona's plaintive cry: "Surely some revelation is at hand". And seemingly it is. The persona is assailed by a fantastical vision "somewhere in sands of the desert", an allusion to the Temptation of Christ, of "A shape with lion body and the head of a man" The "rough beast", its centuries long wait now ended, makes its way to the appointed place for the final confrontation.

The persona equates the slaughter of the Great War and it socio-political ramifications with the biblical end times, although this should not be taken literally. There is a surprisingly literal interpretation to this poem. Yeats describes a sphinx-like beast arising in the desert.

It is entirely possible that this is the "rough beast" to which he refers, and that the metaphorical nature of the creature is there simply to add depth to the poem. Yeats had a bizarre but fully developed mystical belief system, which he outlined in a relatively obscure book called A Vision. A central tenet of this belief was that history repeats itself in cycles, which he called "gyres". The connection to the first part of the poem is obvious. In the second part of the poem, Yeats mentions the Spiritus Mundi , which is another part of his belief system.

The litertal translation is "spirit of the world", which Yeats held to be a collective soul or folk memory, a repository of all cultural history throughout the world. That, of course, makes Christian culture a tiny fragment of the whole. Yeats saw the Spiritus Mundi in a vision, which he describes in terms that have a very literal parallel in the poem:. So: the poem can be read literally. The "rough beast" is the resurrection of a thousand dead gods in a single image. It is terrifying only because it will wipe out our Christianised, homogenised culture and return us to a primal state.

That said, there is no doubt that Yeats was well aware of the symbolic values of his verse, because he talked about them himself. In a letter he wrote that the poem was:. This is, of course, refers to the rise of Facism in Europe. However, it seems likely that, here, Yeats may be assigning himself an undue level of foresight. The poem was written in January While the world was indeed "falling apart" in the aftermath of the first world war and the influenza epidemic, making it easy to fear for the future, it seems unlikely anyone could have been so specific about those fears as to foree the Nazis.

References: - W. Yeats's "A Vision": Explications and Contexts, If the previous civilization began with a birth in Bethlehem, then whatever comes next symbolically repeats the pattern.

But when all we see about us is the fall of the old, how would we know what comes next? And so the question: what rough beast? 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?

National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. May the levers pull smoothly, and the rectangles fill with black. May your reward sticker stay stuck to your lapel all day. Because you deserve it. You love animals; you may hate hunting.

But this was a rogue elephant, insane in musth, crushing cars and villagers. It had to be killed. We will not take trophies, no ivory keepsakes, no foot-on-head selfies. We will burn it decently and with regret for the noble animal it once was. And then we will start to rebuild. Caesar holds a PhD in comparative literature from the Sorbonne. She teaches writing at Michigan State University. He reviews fiction and nonfiction for Lambda Literary. From San Antonio, he lives in Brooklyn. Barbara Quick Blood Pressure I have a tiny ovoid blood-pressure pill, light blue, that I cut in half with a plastic machine, a little guillotine, the pharmacist at Kaiser gave me when I said I wanted a lower dosage.

Try as I might, my cuts are always imprecise, and the halves are always uneven. Its prettiness is a nice disguise for my distress that I need to take a pill every day, no matter how diminutive its size. Every morning, on waking, I prise the box open and contemplate the tiny blue, uneven halves, like a school of minnows in a golden sea, and I ask myself what kind of day is this likely to be?

I never needed medication before aligning my life with his. But life is harder now and much more stressful with my husband home full time. Is it a day for a larger half, or even two of the smaller fragments, placed side by side on my tongue and swallowed?

He seems to possess the belief that my purpose in life is to absorb his pain: to always forgive, always be giving and kind, no matter how he speaks to me. He sees my grief as a sign of my cruelty, as a testament of blame heaped upon his self-recrimination and feelings of shame.

To comfort the traumatized girl I was, growing up in a place that was so violent and unsafe, with a father I loved, whose psychic pain scarred all of us, whose anguish and psychotic rage permeated the air I breathed and probably, like any pollution, damaged my young heart in some insidious way?

How can I protect myself and also be kind, remembering how much I want to heal whatever wounds reveal themselves, both his and mine? Last night was hell and yet we slept. Today I choose the largest little minnow I can find.

She is also the author of three novels, with another forthcoming in She lives in Sonoma County, Calif. Online at BarbaraQuick. Yeats began writing the poem in January , in the wake of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and political turmoil in his native Ireland. But the first stanza captures more than just political unrest and violence. Of course, twentieth-century history did turn more horrific after , as the poem forebodes. A century later, we can see the beast in the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, the regimes of Stalin and Mao, and all manner of systematized atrocity.

Mere anarchy indeed.