Whoops, sorry about the double post.
Malthus, I appreciate your point. Thank you for making it.
I remember a few things from a discussion of this a work a few years ago. At the time of writing, the Russian Revolution and the Black-and-Tan War in Ireland were raging along with WWI.
Our Prof. discussed how Yeats envisioned the evolution of thought as a cone, with ideas swirling form the narrow centre toward the broad open end. Eventually ideas begin to swirl around a new locus, a new “cone” begins as the previous centre is lost. Projected to a societal level, this shift is a change in the social paradigm or “zeitgeist,” the traditional order is displaced and a time of chaos ensues.
Certainly not the definitive interpretation, however it jibes well with other swirling imagery in the poem.
Great thread!
With regard to the poem’s Christian imagery, Yeats had a complex view of religion, inspired by the Golden Dawn, Thelemic teaching, Aleister Crowley, and Celtic myth and legend. There are a lot of books written about the relationship between various forms of mysticism and Yeats, but it’s safe to say he was not a Christian poet in any conventional sense.
However, that said, the poem almost certainly relates in part to the beast described in Revelations Chapter 13, which rises up prior to the ultimate battle between good and evil: “And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion.”
As well as the Great War, the poem also might relate to the abortive Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland, which took place in 1916, and about which Yeats wrote (in his poem “Easter, 1916”; the named people are AFAIK all leaders of the rebellion, most of whom were killed by the British):
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead.
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse –
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
On the other hand, you could compare the poem to other verses of despair and decline of the time, like Eliot’s “The Wasteland”.
IIRC, Ursula K. Le Quin also uses these lines as the frontispiece for Always Coming Home.
What is the “ceremony of innocence?” Baptism?
Yeats saw reality as a series of interlocking, spinning cones, the “gyres” of the poem. If you’re interested in Yeat’s cosmology, his major treatise is titled A Vision. I’m not sure if it remains in print, as it is extremely difficult reading.
UnuMondo
I understood the “gyre” to simply refer to the turning motion of the falcon as it escaped the control of the falconer - it is very interesting to find that there is a symbolic meaning to it as well.
Shazbot, I thought this was a Harry Turtledove thread.