The World’s Center Cannot Hold

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was far from a Christian. Yet, The Second Coming viciously and poignantly expresses a point crucial for Christians to understand about the world in which we find ourselves. Though hell-bound, Yeats was a poet of great skill. Thus, he could bring men to understand the gut-churning emptiness and despair of a world which comes to pieces, of a certainty that something must change, of knowing that the imminent change can only be a terror, never a comfort.

The Second Coming comes in two stanzas. The first stanza lays out the present disintegration; the second reveals to the reader his looming terror. In neither does Yeats perceive hope. The biblical imagery, such as it is, is merely a dry, picked-over skeleton in the midst of a desert, caressed by the dust.

The first four lines bring us the most famous part of this poem: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold….” Perhaps, like me, you find that these clauses seize upon you. Perhaps they leave you dispassionate. Regardless, in these words, we see the perspective of the man who knows not God.

A Collapsing World

The world around us is falling apart. A delirious senility seems to have seized the Western world. Governments spout nonsense, accumulate wealth, and forget justice. Churches splinter into inane squabbles and fits of heresy. Families are assembled in shapes God never gave, cut apart by choices He never permitted. Men drift amidst a world where everything which should be united is particulate, where, it seems, all which should be a man’s own is being accreted into others. Men not only lack community but the knowledge of how to have community; they seek out its semblance online and through superficialities and in unworthy causes, drink thirstily, and are ever more parched.

This disintegration, suicidal and inflicted, is the fruit of centuries of sin. The sins of the 700s, of the 1500s, of the 1600s, the 1700s, the 1800s, the sins of the 1900s, even the sins of the 2000s, all have come home to roost. Many evils we cast forth by a mighty struggle have now returned with seven others greater than themselves (Luke 11:25-26). Pagan man’s greatest striving works only a moment’s respite; like Beowulf, he brings ‘peace in his time’ and then a complete destruction, more thorough and still certain.

What a precise statement of the illness we find here in Yeats! “The centre,” it indeed “cannot hold.” The center around which the world sets itself is the rallying cry of Psalm 14:1: “There is no God.” Such a center cannot hold. Yet, for a time, it can seem to hold. It can be propped up by superficial virtues and the legacy of a God-centered past. In this seeming, the world rested its hope.Now, though, “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”; we have found, in the Preacher’s words, that “All is vanity” (Ecc. 1:2). In such a disintegration, in such a revelation of the truth of rebellion’s foundation, then truly, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

“The Second Coming”

“Surely,” Yeats cries, “some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” Though he correctly perceives that disintegration heralds change, he does not mean these words as a Christian does, in hope. As we swiftly discover, these words are a declaration of despair. Yeats, being no child of God, sees only one possibility for the revelation and the Second Coming: “A vast image out of Spiritus Mundi….”

The spirit of the world issues forth before Yeats’s eyes, “A shape with lion body and the head of a man.” This revelation has no mercy or kindness, no people to be saved, no differentiation in its sight, only “A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” Yeats sees, with poetic instinct, that a complete disintegration of the world requires a change amounting to rebirth. As a pagan, however, he cannot hope, not truly. All which succeeds desolation is destruction, grim despair graven like Babylon’s stone.

Yeats, as the poem makes clear, shut his eyes against Christ’s light. Historically, the poet delved into the occult, preferring false knowledge to Christian repentance. The ‘gyres’ mentioned in the first line of the poem are actually an image related to the occult: mystic cones of history which raise and lower mankind’s passage in twenty-century cycles (as mentioned in the second stanza). Not being an expert on Yeats, I will not dive deeper than this, but we must recognize how he spiritually mutilates himself, refusing to see (Rom. 1:19-21).

No Joy

This “great beast,” then, comes at the dying of the second millennium (Yeats wrote from the late 1800s into the mid-1900s), at the end of the era of the “cradle,” dominated by Christ and His shadow. In parody of Christ, this beast “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.” Yeats has no joy in seeing the nativity of the new generation. No, this offspring of the Spiritus Mundi is a “rough beast” whose nature Yeats himself only surmises upon, and that with dread. The world’s son is terror and grim darkness only, not salvation.

The weight communicated by this poem (a weight which remains if I am discovered to have misunderstood Yeats entirely) is the world in which the unrighteous live, they who know not God. The world falls apart around such a man, and the world is all he has. He has no mooring. His center has collapsed. Anarchy descends upon him, and he is hopeless.

Does not the modern world exhibit just this despair?

The Weight of Despair

Men respond to this despair as always: by rebelling again, in ways perhaps novel to the individual but long known to history. We turn to drink, to drugs, to sex, to entertainment, to work, to complaining, to politics, to violence, to false religion, to perversion, to legalistic purity, to anything which is not God. Many men, so turning, find that they can paper over, cover up, cast out the demon of despair for a time. Then he returns, as Christ warned, and a new haven must be found, for the state of the prisoner is worse with every escape (Matt. 12:45).

The weight of this despair sits upon all those who know him not. Are they well-fed, well-friended, well-busied with pleasures and labors and all the good things of this world? Yet they live in an empty world, a world without God. They know, despite themselves, that if they were to have their center hold, they must not rest upon it, must remain desperately and determinedly suspended above, eyes shut, fingers numb.

All this emptiness becomes clearer when the world’s disintegration crescendos and becomes visible on a grand scale. The world ended in A.D. 70, when the Temple fell, because in that instant many a man found that his center could no longer hold, that his center was not the Lord and it had not ever been, for he was blind (Matt. 3:9). Perhaps he shut his eyes again, reformed a new façade for the center, but the center’s destruction was for a moment his utter ending.

Other such dramatic moments of falling apart can be found in history (though, as a partial preterist, I hold A.D. 70 the weightiest yet). The fall of Byzantium, the French Revolution, the time a man lost his family business or indeed his family’s life, these and a thousand other moments have exposed false centers, idols, to their holders. We stand in a time of such center-breaks, when the mighty things of the world work industriously to discredit and destroy themselves. Unlike Yeats, unlike the pagan, we anticipate a true change.

By His Grace Alone

In the moment when a center breaks, some new revelation must come, unless the man is to commit suicide (whether literal or effective). Yeats’s revelation and the world’s is ‘more of the same,’ another “rough beast,” uncaring and inscrutable, impersonal alteration. God’s revelation and the revelation of His people, however, is: “Come to Me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). His revelation is the gospel, the death of Christ for sin and His resurrection to make us righteous (Rom. 6:5), the Father’s sons (Is. 64:8).

This hope we can give to the world. Will they hear? By His grace alone.The world, as Yeats exhibits, is a place natively hopeless. Often that despair is quiet and cloaked, hidden beneath prosperity, smothered with sensation. Sometimes it is open, as in the Israel of Lamentations. It always writhes, however. We must not forget this. We must see; we must have mercy; we must speak and declare and lift the banner of His kingdom (Ps. 2:9-12) under which alone can man have peace (Is. 9:7).

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