What is Yeats gyre theory?
It simply is. Yeats conceptualized history as a series of interpenetrating gyres. Historical eras overlap, one ending as the next one begins. He believed that these gyres or eras of history tended to fall into roughly 2,000-year periods. While one tends to dominant, the other is always implied and weakly present.
What does the gyre represent in Yeats The Second Coming?
A gyre, according to Yeats, represented “the precise movement” of the human mind, according to the introduction to his 1921 publication The Second Coming.
How does the gyre in each poem illustrate Yeats philosophy?
The world “gyre” means spiral. As he was writing the poem in 1919, it felt to him as if the spiral of Christian history had unwound to its farthest point and a new period was beginning. The significance of this new cycle or gyre is that it is characterized by Yeats as full of darkness and violence.
Who had given the gyre theory What was it about?
Writing on the heels of the First World War and at the advent of the Irish War of Independence, William Butler Yeats used the concept of the gyre as an unstoppable, terrifying dynamic force.
What does Widening Gyre mean?
The falcon is described as “turning” in a “widening gyre” until it can no longer “hear the falconer,” its human master. A gyre is a spiral that expands outward as it goes up. Yeats uses the image of gyres frequently in his poems to describe the motion of history toward chaos and instability.
What does the falconer symbolize in The Second Coming?
The falconer in “The Second Coming” is generally thought to represent Christ. The falconer also hints at Yeats’ fundamentally aristocratic understanding of politics. Hunting with falcons is an activity traditionally associated with the upper-classes, with “the best people” in society.
What does the rough beast symbolize in The Second Coming?
What does the rough beast symbolize in the Second Coming? The poem is alluding to the Book of Revelation. The “rough beast” is the Anti-Christ. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre” also alludes to the view of a cyclical nature of history expressed elsewhere by the poet.
What does blood dimmed tide mean?
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere. The ceremony of innocence is drowned; These three lines describe a situation of violence and terror through phrases like “anarchy,” “blood-dimmed tide,” and “innocence [. . .] drowned.” (By the way, “mere” doesn’t mean “only” in this context; it means “total” or “pure.”)