William Butler Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” is a profound meditation on aging, art, and the quest for spiritual transcendence, despite his failure to clearly grasp the Eastern religious/philosophical concepts he strived to portray.
Introduction and Excerpt from “Sailing to Byzantium”
William Butler Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” is a profound meditation on aging, art, and the quest for spiritual transcendence. However, despite Yeats’ deep engagement with Eastern religion and philosophy, his interpretation and application of these concepts in his poetry often reveal a “Romantic misunderstanding,” as T.S. Eliot astutely observed.
This misunderstanding is clearly evident in “Sailing to Byzantium,” especially in its fourth stanza, where Yeats’ vision of eternal existence through art diverges significantly from Eastern religious/philosophical principles.
Yeats wrote “Sailing to Byzantium” in 1926, at the age of 61, as a reflection on the aging process and the spiritual journey required to maintain vitality in the face of physical decline.
Sailing to Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Commentary on “Sailing to Byzantium”
The poem “Sailing to Byzantium” uses a journey to Byzantium (Constantinople now Istanbul,) as a metaphor for a spiritual quest, with the speaker seeking to transcend the limitations of the mortal body and achieve a form of immortality through art.
First Stanza: Contrasting Vividly
That is no country for old men. The young In one another’s arms, birds in the trees —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.
The opening stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium” presents a vivid contrast between the vitality of youth and the poet’s sense of alienation from the natural world as he ages. Yeats paints a picture of a country teeming with life, where “The young / In one another’s arms, birds in the trees” and “the mackerel-crowded seas” represent the cyclical nature of life and death.
The phrase “Those dying generations” underscores the transient nature of all living things, a concept that aligns with Eastern philosophy’s emphasis on impermanence. However, Yeats’ reaction to this natural cycle reveals a departure from Eastern thought.
While Buddhism and Hinduism often advocate for acceptance of life’s impermanence, Yeats expresses a desire to escape it. His assertion that “all neglect / Monuments of unageing intellect” suggests a privileging of human intellect and art over the natural world, a distinctly Western perspective that contradicts the Eastern emphasis on harmony with nature.
Second Stanza: Aging and the Quest for Renewal
An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium.
In the second stanza, Yeats further develops the theme of aging and the quest for spiritual renewal. The image of an aged man as “a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick” vividly conveys the physical deterioration that comes with age. However, Yeats proposes that this decline can be transcended if the soul can “clap its hands and sing, and louder sing / For every tatter in its mortal dress.”
This concept of the soul triumphing over bodily decay echoes certain Eastern philosophical ideas, particularly the Hindu concept of the soul, which is the eternal self, transcending the physical body.
However, Yeats’ emphasis on the soul’s need to “sing” and study “Monuments of its own magnificence” reveals a more Western, ego-centric approach to spiritual transcendence. In contrast, many Eastern philosophies advocate for the dissolution of the ego and the realization of the soul’s unity with the Divine Reality.
Third Stanza: The Concept of Transformation
O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.
The third stanza introduces the “sages standing in God’s holy fire,” whom the speaker implores to be the “singing-masters of my soul.” This imagery draws on both Western and Eastern concepts, blending Christian imagery of holy fire with the Eastern idea of spiritual masters or gurus. The speaker’s desire to have his heart consumed away and to be gathered into “the artifice of eternity” reflects a yearning for spiritual transformation.
However, Yeats’ conception of this transformation as an “artifice” created by sages diverges from Eastern philosophical traditions. In many Eastern spiritual practices, enlightenment or liberation is seen not as an artificial state created by external forces, but as the realization of one’s true nature, of uniting the individual soul with the Oversoul, or God. Yeats’ portrayal suggests a more Western, interventionist approach to spiritual transformation.
Fourth Stanza: Romantic Misunderstanding
Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
The final stanza of “Sailing to Byzantium” most clearly demonstrates Yeats’ “Romantic misunderstanding” of Eastern philosophy. Here, the speaker envisions his eternal form not as a dissolution into God-consciousness (self-realization), as many Eastern traditions insist, but as a golden artifact created by “Grecian goldsmiths.” This vision of immortality through art is fundamentally at odds with Eastern concepts of liberation from the cycle of birth and death.
Yeats’ desire to take a form “Of hammered gold and gold enamelling” to entertain “lords and ladies of Byzantium” reveals a distinctly Western preoccupation with individual identity and artistic legacy. This contrasts sharply with Eastern religious/philosophical concepts such as the Buddhist non-self upon entering nirvana or the Hindu idea of samadhi or liberation from cycles of death and rebirth.
Furthermore, the speaker’s intention to “sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium / Of what is past, or passing, or to come” suggests a linear view of time that is more aligned with Western thought than with the cyclical time concepts expounded in Eastern religion/philosophy.
While “Sailing to Byzantium” is undoubtedly a masterpiece of poetic craft, it also reveals the limitations of Yeats’ understanding and application of Eastern philosophical concepts.
His vision of spiritual transcendence, particularly as expressed in the fourth stanza, remains rooted in Western ideas of individual immortality and artistic legacy, rather than the Eastern concepts of ego dissolution and unity with the Divine Creator.
This “Romantic misunderstanding” of Eastern philosophy, as Eliot termed it, is indeed on full display in this poem, showcasing both the brilliance of Yeats’ poetic vision and the cultural limitations that shaped his interpretation of Eastern thought.
The speaker in William Butler Yeats’ “The Fisherman” is dramatically promoting a style of poetry that will become and remain meaningful to and beloved by the common folk.
Introduction with Text of “The Fisherman”
William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Fisherman” appears in the poet’s The Wild Swans at Coole, which was brought out in 1919. The poet’s collection features many of his most widely anthologized poems.
In “The Fisherman,” Yeats has created a speaker who is voicing a call for a genuine school of art for the common folk, an art that dramatizes the beauty and truth inherent in all great art.
The speaker is also decrying the cultural suicide being perpetrated by charlatans in art as well as their cohorts who are power-hungry politicians. He thus reveals contempt for fakes and frauds, while promoting an ideal that he strongly believes should be steering art and the cultural life of the nation.
Every nation throughout history has suffered from these same issues, as toppling governments and bloody wars testify. The poets have often spoken up, calling out names and insisting on reforms.
Despite the fact that poetry’s first function arises from personal experience, political controversy often intrudes into the realm of the personal and that is when poets are compelled to use their platform for activism.
Care must be taken, however, that the poet not become a brazen tool for propaganda. As an accomplished world poet and former Irish senator [1], Yeats possessed the acumen to broach issues of art, poetry, culture, and politics.
The former politician and literary Nobel Laureate [2] boasts numerous works that address culture and politics: “The Fisherman” remains one of the most colorful and culturally significant poems of the era.
The Fisherman
Although I can see him still, The freckled man who goes To a grey place on a hill In grey Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his flies, It’s long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man. All day I’d looked in the face What I had hoped ’twould be To write for my own race And the reality; The living men that I hate, The dead man that I loved, The craven man in his seat, The insolent unreproved, And no knave brought to book Who has won a drunken cheer, The witty man and his joke Aimed at the commonest ear, The clever man who cries The catch-cries of the clown, The beating down of the wise And great Art beaten down.
Maybe a twelvemonth since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man And his sun-freckled face, And grey Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark under froth, And the down turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream: A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, “Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.”
Reading of “The Fisherman”
Commentary on “The Fisherman”
The speaker in William Butler Yeats’ poem is heralding a style of poetry that will be beloved by the common folk. He makes his contempt for charlatans known. He encourages the ideals that he believes must guide culture and art. Yeats was a promoter of the style of art that he thought was closest to the hearts and minds of the Irish.
First Movement: Recalling an Admired Man
Although I can see him still, The freckled man who goes To a grey place on a hill In grey Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his flies, It’s long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man.
The speaker appears to be remembering a special man whom he has respected: “[t]he freckled man” wearing “Connemara clothes.” This man has been in the habit of fishing at a “gray place on a hill.”
The speaker implies that in his mind’s eye, he can still perceive the man. And it may also be that the speaker literally meets the man occasionally in the village. However, the speaker has not as of late mused upon the man.
The speaker admires the man’s simple ways. He assumes that the man is “wise and simple.” The speaker then continues to cogitate upon those very same qualities as he continues his message.
The speaker entertains a deep desire to praise the virtues of simplicity and wisdom. He has observed those qualities in the folks who are doing ordinary, simple everyday tasks.
Second Movement: Researching History
All day I’d looked in the face What I had hoped ’twould be To write for my own race And the reality; The living men that I hate, The dead man that I loved, The craven man in his seat, The insolent unreproved,
The speaker has determined that he will make a plan to write for his own people, including the real experiences they all undergo. With the plan in mind, he has begun to research the history of his nation and its people. The speaker asserts that he hopes to reveal the reality of the lived experience of his fellow citizens.
Such a reality should well acquit itself and at the same time demonstrate and dramatize the exact truths that future generations will be likely to undergo.The speaker offers a catalogue of qualities that the men who make up the current political landscape have put on display.
Some of those men will be the recipients of his ire. He brazenly states that there are living men whom he hates. He then contrasts that negative emotion with its opposite by emphasizing that there is as well the “dead man that [he] loved.”
The speaker continues in his enflamed hatred by asserting that the “craven” exist while the “insolent” remain unrestricted in their perfidy. The speaker believes that by contrasting good and evil, he can demonstrate the efficacy of the arrival of a steady virtue upon which to build a better art and poetry that can represent Irish culture more faithfully and honestly.
Third Movement: The Guilty Avoiding Justice
And no knave brought to book Who has won a drunken cheer, The witty man and his joke Aimed at the commonest ear, The clever man who cries The catch-cries of the clown, The beating down of the wise And great Art beaten down.
The speaker continues referring to the rogues and knaves, who have thus far evaded justice though guilty. The speaker loathes those frauds who have “won a drunken cheer,” even as they have remained undeserving of celebrity and honor.
The speaker makes it clear that there is a sector of despicable characters who damage, cheapen, and pile shame on the culture. The speaker accuses such unscrupulous scoundrels of attempting to destroy the art of the nation.
They, in effect, denigrate “the wise” as they dismantle the “great Art” that they have inherited. The speaker grieves that these killers of culture have succeeded in their perfidy. Thus, he is calling attention to their misdeeds. He is proposing a change in focus in order to improve values. He is not suggesting censorship of the charlatans.
Fourth Movement: Cultural Assassins
Maybe a twelvemonth since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man And his sun-freckled face, And grey Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark under froth,
The speaker then reports that for a while he has been incubating the idea of creating an uncomplicated, “sun-freckled face”—the man in “Connemara cloth.” For his effort, he has thus far received only “scorn” from the ilk of those culture killers and unscrupulous reprobates.
Nevertheless, the speaker has been pressing on, striving to envision a simple fisherman, who “climb[s] up to a place / Where stone is dark with froth,” a natural place that continues to be pristine and still remains alluring.
The speaker is crafting a symbolic being whom he can describe and on whom he can bestow the qualities that he deems must become and remain an important part of the natural art, belonging to the people of his environs.
Fifth Movement: The Importance of Simplicity
And the down turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream: A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, “Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.”
The speaker visualizes the fisherman’s wrist movement as the man casts his line into the water. He admits that this man does not yet exist, because he is still “but a dream.” The speaker’s keen sensibility is strong enough to bring to life such a simple, rustic character. He is urged then to take all pains to bring such a character to life.
Thus, while the poet is still young enough to use his God-given imagination, he vows to take on the task of writing this fisherman into existence and to compose for the man a poem “as cold / And passionate as the dawn.”
The speaker continues to muse on simplicity. He passionately desires to create a new ideal that will produce meaningful, original, dramatic poetry.
He insists that that new poetry must be able to speak with genuine originality and that it thus should become a harbinger of the beginning of a new era in art of poetry.
The speaker hopes to accomplish all of this despite the wrong-headedness and power-grabbing of too many of the political phonies—and despite the fraudulent deceivers whose selfishness is spreading the destruction of their own culture.
William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” remains one of the most widely misunderstood poems of the 20th century. Many scholars and critics have failed to criticize the exaggeration in the first stanza and the absurd metaphor in the second stanza, which render a potentially fine poem a critical failure.
Introduction with Text of “The Second Coming”
Poems, in order to communicate, must be as logical as the purpose and content require. For example, if the poet wishes to comment on or criticize an issue, he must adhere to physical facts in his poetic drama. If the poet wishes to emote, equivocate, or demonstrate the chaotic nature of his cosmic thinking, he may legitimately do so without much seeming sense.
For example, Robert Bly’s lines—”Sometimes a man walks by a pond, and a hand / Reaches out and pulls him in” / / “The pond was lonely, or needed / Calcium, bones would do,”—are ludicrous [1] on every level. Even if one explicates the speaker’s personifying the pond, the lines remain absurd, at least in part because if a person needs calcium, grabbing the bones of another human being will not take care of that deficiency.
The absurdity of a lake needing “calcium” should be abundantly clear on its face. Nevertheless, the image of the lake grabbing a man may ultimately be accepted as the funny nonsense that it is. William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” cannot be dismissed so easily; while the Yeats poem does not depict the universe as totally chaotic, it does bemoan that fact that events seem to be leading society to armageddon.
The absurdity surrounding the metaphor of the “rough beast” in the Yeats poem renders the musing on world events without practical substance.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 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?
Commentary on “The Second Coming”
William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming” remains one of the most widely anthologized poems in world literature. Yet its hyperbole in the first stanza and ludicrous “rough beast” metaphor in the second stanza result in a blur of unworkable speculation.
First Stanza: Sorrowful over Chaos
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.
The speaker is sorrowing over the chaos of world events that have left in their wake many dead people. Clashes of groups of ideologues have wreaked havoc, and much blood shed has smeared the tranquil lives of innocent people who wish to live quiet, productive lives.
The speaker likens the seemingly out of control situation of society to a falconer losing control of the falcon as he attempts to tame it. Everyday life has become chaotic as corrupt governments have spurred revolutions. Lack of respect for leadership has left a vacuum which is filled with force and violence.
The overstated claim that “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” should have alerted the poet that he needed to rinse out the generic hyperbole in favor of more accuracy on the world stage.
Such a blanket, unqualified statement, especially in a poem, lacks the ring of truth: it simply cannot be true that the “best lack all conviction.” Surely, some the best still retain some level of conviction, or else improvement could never be expected.
It also cannot be true that all the worst are passionate; some of the worst are likely not passionate at all but remain sycophantic, indifferent followers. Any reader should be wary of such all-inclusive, absolutist statements in both prose and poetry.
Anytime a writer subsumes an entirety with the terms “all,” “none,” “everything,” “everyone,” “always,” or “never,” the reader should question the statement for its accuracy. All too often such terms are signals for stereotypes, which produce the same inaccuracy as groupthink.
Second Stanza: What Revelation?
Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 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?
The idea of “some revelation” leads the speaker to the mythological second coming of Christ. So he speculates on what a second coming might entail. However, instead of “Christ,” the speaker conjures the notion that an Egyptian-Sphinx-like character with ill-intent might arrive instead.
Therefore, in place of a second coming of godliness and virtue, as is the purpose of the original second coming, the speaker wonders: what if the actual second coming will be more like an Anti-Christ? What if all this chaos of bloodshed and disarray has been brought on by the opposite of Christian virtue?
Postmodern Absurdity and the “Rough Beast”
The “rough beast” in Yeats’ “The Second Coming” is an aberration of imagination, not a viable symbol for what Yeats’ speaker thought he was achieving in his critique of culture. If, as the postmodernists contend, there is no order [2] in the universe and nothing really makes any sense anyway, then it becomes perfectly fine to write nonsense.
Because this poet is a contemporary of modernism but not postmodernism [3], William Butler Yeats’ poetry and poetics do not quite devolve to the level of postmodern angst that blankets everything with the nonsensical. Yet, his manifesto titled A Vision is, undoubtedly, one of the contributing factors to that line of meretricious ideology.
Hazarding a Guess Can Be Hazardous
The first stanza of Yeats’ “The Second Coming” begins by metaphorically comparing a falconer losing control of the falcon to nations and governments losing control because of the current world disorder, in which “[t]hings fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”
Political factions employ these lines against their opposition during the time in which their opposition is in power, as they spew forth praise for their own order that somehow magically appears with their taking the seat of power.
The poem has been co-opted by the political class so often that Dorian Lynskey, overviewing the poem in his essay, “‘Things fall apart’: the Apocalyptic Appeal of WB Yeats’s The Second Coming,” writes, “There was apparently no geopolitical drama to which it could not be applied” [4].
The second stanza dramatizes the speaker’s musing about a revelation that has popped into his head, and he likens that revelation to the second coming of Christ; however, this time the coming, he speculates, may be something much different.
The speaker does not know what the second coming will herald, but he does not mind hazarding a dramatic guess about the possibility. Thus, he guesses that the entity of a new “second coming” would likely be something that resembles the Egyptian sphinx; it would not be the return of the Christ with the return of virtue but perhaps its opposite—vice.
The speaker concludes his guess with an allusion to the birth of such an entity as he likens the Blessed Virgin Mother to the “rough beast.” The Blessèd Virgin Mother, as a newfangled, postmodern creature, will be “slouching toward Bethlehem” because that is the location to which the first coming came.
The allusion to “Bethlehem” functions solely as a vague juxtaposition to the phrase “second coming” in hopes that the reader will make the connection that the first coming and the second coming may have something in common. The speaker speculates that at this very moment wherein the speaker is doing his speculation some “rough beast” might be pregnant with the creature of the “second coming.”
And as the time arrives for the creature to be born, the rough beast will go “slouching” towards its lair to give birth to this “second coming” creature: “its hour come round at last” refers to the rough beast being in labor.
The Flaw of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”
The speaker then poses the nonsensical question: “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” In order to make the case that the speaker wishes to make, these last two lines should be restructured in one of two ways:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehemto give birth?
or
And what rough beast‘s babe, its time come at last, Is in transport to Bethlehem to be born?
An unborn being cannot “slouch” toward a destination. The pregnant mother of the unborn being can “slouch” toward a destination. But the speaker is not contemplating the nature of the rough beast’s mother; he is contemplating the nature of the rough beast itself.
The speaker does not suggest that the literal Sphinx will travel to Bethlehem. He is merely implying that a Sphinx-like creature might resemble the creature of the second coming. Once an individual has discounted the return of Jesus the Christ as a literal or even spiritual fact, one might offer personal speculation about just what a second coming would look like.
It is doubtful that anyone would argue that the poem is dramatizing a literal birth, rather than a spiritual or metaphorical one. It is also unreasonable to argue that the speaker of this poem—or Yeats for that matter—thought that the second coming actually referred to the Sphinx. A ridiculous image develops from the fabrication of the Sphinx moving toward Bethlehem. Yeats was more prudent than that.
Exaggerated Importance of Poem
William Butler Yeats composed a manifesto to display his worldview and poetics titled A Vision, in which he set down certain tenets of his thoughts on poetry, creativity, and world history. Although seemingly taken quite seriously by some Yeatsian scholars, A Vision is of little value in understanding either meaning in poetry or the meaning of the world, particularly in terms of historical events.
An important example of Yeats’ misunderstanding of world cycles is his explanation of the cyclical nature of history, exemplified with what he called “gyres” (pronounced with a hard “g.”) Two particular points in the Yeatsian explanation demonstrate the fallacy of his thinking:
In his diagram, Yeats set the position of the gyres inaccurately; they should not be intersecting but instead one should rest one on top of the other: cycles shrink and enlarge in scope; they do not overlap, as they would have to do if the Yeatsian model were accurate.
2. In the traditional Second Coming, Christ is figured to come again but as an adult, not as in infant as is implied in Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming.”
Of great significance in Yeats’ poem is the “rough beast,” apparently the Anti-Christ, who has not been born yet. And most problematic is that the rough beast is “slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born.” The question is, how can such a creature be slouching if it has not yet been born? There is no indication the speaker wishes to attribute this second coming fiasco to the mother of the rough beast.
This illogical event is never mentioned by critics who seem to accept the slouching as a possible occurrence. On this score, it seems critics and scholars have lent the poem an unusually wide and encompassing poetic license.
The Accurate Meaning of the Second Coming
Paramahansa Yogananda has explained in depth the original, spiritual meaning of the phrase “the second coming”[5] which does not signify the literal coming again of Jesus the Christ, but the spiritual awakening of each individual soul to its Divine Nature through the Christ Consciousness.
Paramahansa Yogananda summarizes his two volume work The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You:
In titling this work The Second Coming of Christ, I am not referring to a literal return of Jesus to earth . . .
A thousand Christs sent to earth would not redeem its people unless they themselves become Christlike by purifying and expanding their individual consciousness to receive therein the second coming of the Christ Consciousness, as was manifested in Jesus . . .
Contact with this Consciousness, experienced in the ever new joy of meditation, will be the real second coming of Christ—and it will take place right in the devotee’s own consciousness. (my emphasis added)
Interestingly, knowledge of the meaning of that phrase “the second coming” as explained by Paramahansa Yogananda renders unnecessary the musings of Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”and most other speculation about the subject. Still, the poem as an artifact of 20th century thinking remains an important object for study.
William Butler Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” focuses on an ancient Greek myth. Leda, wife of Tyndareus, was impregnated by Zeus disguised as a swan. Yeats’ speaker offers his musing regarding the nature of such an act and how it might have impacted Leda’s mental capacities.
Introduction and Text from “Leda and the Swan”
The London news outlet The Telegraph, April 28, 2012 edition, features an article titled, “‘Mythical’ Swan Photo Taken Down After ‘Bestiality’ Fears” [1], in which Hannah Furness reports about an incident involving this ancient myth.
Derrick Santini’s photograph depicting the mythological coupling of Leda and the god Zeus in his disguise as a swan was on display at The Scream, a gallery owned by Tyrone and Jamie Wood, sons of Ronnie Wood, legendary guitarist for The Rolling Stones.
A London police officer caught a glimpse of the photographic art piece and reported his observation; then two of the officer’s uniformed colleagues showed up at The Scream to investigate further.
Because of the law declaring bestiality an “arrestable offence,” the officers informed the gallery owners that they would have remove the offending piece of art. The curators quickly complied because the work had already been on display the entire month and was scheduled for removal anyway.
Had the officers appeared and made their censorious demands on the opening day the display, the gallery owners would likely have taken their battle over the issue to court. Jamie Wood explained,
We would of course have fought to keep the piece up otherwise. If anyone wants to view it, we still have it at the gallery. The purpose of art is to provoke debate and Derrick’s piece has certainly done that.
This scenario bespeaks a troublesome direction for Western culture—an law officer was unable to recognize a piece of art depicting an ancient Greek myth. Nevertheless, the clash between art and culture remains an issue for all time periods.
William Butler Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan” focuses on the ancient Greek myth, wherein the woman, Leda, wife of Tyndareus, was impregnated by the god Zeus in disguise as a swan. Yeats’ speaker is musing regarding the nature of such an act and how it might have impacted Leda’s mental capacities afterward.
William Butler Yeats’ refurbishing of the famous copulation scene features a modern day rethinking of the event, but adding to it implications that likely the original myth creators would find amusing at best, disturbing at worst.
In fact, the symbolism of the myth continues to offer occasion for interpretation, and individuals will approach the act of interpretation according to their own moral standards as well as their own repository of facts.
Yeats’ poem “Leda and the Swan” is an innovative sonnet (aka American-innovative sonnet) [2], sporting 15 lines rather than the traditional 14. In the Shakespeare 154-sonnet sequence, sonnet 99 [3] also contains an extra line, as the first stanza becomes a cinquain replacing the traditional quatrain.
Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Reading of “Leda and the Swan” by Siobhan McKena”
Commentary on “Leda and the Swan”
William Butler Yeats creates a speaker who is offering an interpretation of the ancient Greek myth, apparently to pose a question on which he has been and would likely continue to cogitate.
First Stanza: In the Middle of Things
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
The poem begins in medias res, that is, the coupling is in progress after the sudden descension of the swan that has swooped down and is now engaging with the woman Leda.
The wings of the swan continue to flutter, after he has caused the woman to stagger. He grasps her thighs with his “dark webs,” then grips her by the neck, holding her against his body. The woman remains helpless, unable to loosen herself from this grip.
This myth has often been interpreted as a rape, and Yeats’ interpretation certainly provides the violence that could indeed lead to that line of thinking. However, based on the actual mythic narrative, a case might be made that Leda was not actually an unwilling party to this act of coupling. Later that same day, Leda copulates with her husband.
The extraordinary result from those two acts is Leda giving birth to two sets of twins: one set includes Helen and Polydeuces fathered by the swan-Zeus, and the other set of twins is Castor and Clytemnestra fathered by Tyndareus.
Second Stanza: Questions
How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
The speaker of the Yeats poem speculates that the girl cannot push the swan away from her; she is too weak with only “terrified vague fingers,” and he is full of a “feathered glory,” after all he is a god—he is Zeus.
Zeus’ ability to loosen Leda’s thighs is absolute; thus, there is no hope that she could do other than to remain resigned to enduring that gigantic avian’s heart beating upon her. All she can do is struggle helplessly as he forces his masculinity into her feminine receptacle through his “white rush.”
Virtually all rhetorical questions function to answer themselves, and this speaker engages two rhetorical questions that follow that format. Yet, at the same time, those questions demonstrate that the speaker remains open to other answers. Fundamentally, this speaker is musing upon these events, as he wonders about certain issues, but in the end, he can offer no final answer to his questions.
Third Stanza: Changing the Course of World History
A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
The swan/Zeus deposits his semen into Leda’s vaginal cavity, and all hell breaks loose. That spewed-forth froth coupling with Leda’s human ova will result in two children, who will change the course of history, especially Helen of Troy [4], over whom the Trojan War broke out.
Agamemnon then dies at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra, who was angered by her husband’s sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigenia. As Agamemnon was preparing to sail into war to retrieve Helen, his fleet encountered difficulty which would be assuaged only by sacrifice of his daughter.
Loss of their daughter Iphigenia angered his wife Clytemnestra, so she later kills him. Thus after that climactic “shudder in the loins,” the war flames out which results in the “broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And Agamemnon dead.”
The images of the “broken wall” and the “burning roof and tower” imply sexual imagery: the penetrated female by the male penetrator, as well as the plundering of the city of Troy, by the marauding band of warriors.
In the final musing of the poem, also fashioned as a rhetorical question, the speaker offers his final speculation. He wonders if while Leda was apparently violated by the intrusion of the god Zeus disguised as a swan, perhaps she was also altered.
Perhaps, she actually was able to take on a portion of his “knowledge” and a slice of his “power,” even though he remained “indifferent” to her predicament. Because of the god’s indifference, his swan’s beak just allows the violated woman to “drop.” Did she “drop” with a thud or a swish?
The Power of Myth
Because this poem originates from an interpretation of a Greek mythological narrative, it continues to be open to various interpretations. The decidedly absurd nature of a swan coupling with a human being in conjunction with the scientific fact that conception cannot be accomplished across species clearly indicates that the myth’s dramatic meaning that cannot be taken literally.
Then, too, there is the issue that Leda’s and Zeus’s offspring are born from eggs—not merely eggs in the form of human ova, but resembling avian eggs; it is helpful to remember that Zeus coupled with Leda as he masqueraded as an large bird—a swan.
In the original Zeus/Leda mythic narrative, the issue of coupling appears to be a seduction and not a rape. For example, about the nature of Zeus’ engaging women in sex, the ancient rhetorician Isocrates [5] has stated,
Zeus, lord of all, reveals his power in all else, but deigns to approach beauty in humble guise. For in the likeness of Amphitryon he came to Alcmena, and as a shower of gold he united with Danae, and in the guise of a swan he took refuge in the bosom of Nemesis, and again in this form he espoused Leda; ever with artifice manifestly, and not with violence, does he pursue beauty in women.
According to the Isocrates interpretation, Zeus seduced woman humbly in his various forms, and the god did so not out of selfish lust but for the sake of pursuing and enjoying the beauty in the women who possessed it.
Many artistic expressions—see two examples below—focusing on the Zeus/Leda narrative for their subject matter portray Leda holding the swan affectionately, therefore, supporting Isocrates’ interpretation that the act was seduction not rape.
However, the Yeats poem is one of the interpretations that forces readers to reinterpret the myth as the rape of Leda by Zeus as a swan. Even though the Yeatsian speaker offers only a waffling about what he believes about the whole affair, ultimately he does seem to be strongly suggesting that the act was a rape.
Cleverly, the Yeatsian speaker also takes the direct emphasis off the issue of rape vs seduction by simply posing the rhetorical question about whether Leda took on some of the Zeusian powers.
Image: Walt Whitman – Mathew Brady – Walt Whitman Archive
Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”
Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” is an elegy upon the death of Abraham Lincoln, who guided the Union through the terrible Civil War only to be assassinated after victory had been achieved. The speaker metaphorizes Lincoln into the fallen Captain of a victorious ship, creating Whitman’s most famous expression of national grief.
Introduction and Text of “O Captain! My Captain!”
In Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!,” the speaker presents Abraham Lincoln as the Captain of a ship that has survived a fearful voyage and finally reached the safety of port.
The ship represents the Union, while the Captain represents Lincoln, whose leadership brought the nation through the Civil War. The Library of Congress identifies the poem specifically as Whitman’s 1865 dirge for Lincoln.
The poem becomes especially poignant because Lincoln dies at the very moment that the nation can celebrate victory. The ship has weathered every storm, the prize has been won, and the people are rejoicing, yet the Captain lies dead upon the deck. The public celebration and the speaker’s private grief therefore exist side by side.
Whitman wrote other elegies for Lincoln, most notably “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” The two poems approach Lincoln’s death differently. “Lilacs” expands personal grief into a profound contemplation of death and national healing, while “O Captain! My Captain!” concentrates its emotional power upon the fallen leader and the terrible irony of his death at the moment of victory.
In my earlier essays on Whitman’s poems, I have discussed the speaker’s recognition that death is an integral part of life. That recognition becomes particularly painful here because Lincoln’s death occurs after his great national task has been accomplished. The Captain has brought the ship safely home, but he cannot step ashore to receive the honors prepared for him.
The poem was written in response to Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 and first appeared later that year. Whitman subsequently placed it among his poems remembering Lincoln. The Walt Whitman Archive identifies the Captain as a symbolic representation of Lincoln and the ship as the Union that he had steered through the war.
Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!”
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult O shores, and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.
Commentary on “O Captain! my Captain! ”
The speaker mourns Abraham Lincoln while confronting the painful irony of national victory accompanied by personal loss.
First Stanza: “O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done”
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead..
The first line announces the central irony of the entire elegy. The “fearful trip” is the Civil War, and the ship is the Union. The voyage has ended successfully because the Union has survived the conflict, but the Captain who guided the nation through the storm has been killed.
The phrase “the prize we sought is won” points directly toward the preservation of the Union. The ship has endured the terrible “rack,” or storm, and now approaches port. The historical reality behind the metaphor is therefore essential: the war has ended, victory has come, and Lincoln has been assassinated.
The speaker then creates a scene of national rejoicing. Bells ring, people celebrate, and eyes follow the victorious vessel as it approaches. These details suggest the immense public significance of the Union’s victory after four years of civil conflict.
But the speaker suddenly turns from public celebration to private anguish with “But O heart! heart! heart!” The repeated word “heart” seems almost to stop the celebration in its tracks. The speaker cannot participate in the rejoicing because his attention is fixed upon the blood appearing on the deck.
The “bleeding drops of red” transform the victorious ship into a place of death. The image is particularly powerful because Lincoln’s assassination occurred just as the national crisis represented by the voyage had reached its conclusion. Victory and death occupy the same physical space.
The Captain is therefore Abraham Lincoln, but the speaker never names him. This omission allows Lincoln to become both a historical individual and a symbolic national father. The Whitman Archive notes that Whitman grouped the poem with his other Lincoln poems under “Memories of President Lincoln.”
The speaker’s grief is made more poignant by the fact that Lincoln cannot enjoy the victory he helped achieve. The people on shore can celebrate because the voyage has ended; the speaker can only mourn because the Captain lies dead.
Second Stanza: “O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells”
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead.
The second stanza makes the speaker’s grief even more personal. He begs the Captain to rise because the entire nation is waiting to honor him. The flag is flying, the bugle is sounding, and the people are crowding the shores to welcome their victorious leader.
The repeated phrase “For you” emphasizes the tragic appropriateness of the celebration. Everything has been prepared for Lincoln. The people are celebrating the victory that his leadership helped secure, yet the person whom they have come to honor cannot hear their voices.
The speaker then calls him “dear father.” This expression is particularly significant in an elegy for Abraham Lincoln, whose public image after his assassination became associated with paternal leadership of a divided nation. The Captain is simultaneously the leader of the ship and the beloved father of the speaker.
The phrase “This arm beneath your head!” brings the historical tragedy into an intimate physical scene. The speaker holds Lincoln’s head in his arm as though the dead president were still capable of hearing and responding. The gesture makes the enormous national tragedy intensely personal.
The speaker then says, “It is some dream.” His mind resists what his eyes know. He has not merely lost a political leader; he has lost the Captain who has accompanied him through the fearful voyage.
The relationship between this poem and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” becomes important here. In “Lilacs,” the speaker eventually moves from the immediate shock of Lincoln’s death toward an acceptance of death as part of a larger spiritual reality. “O Captain! My Captain!” remains much closer to the immediate wound.
Paramahansa Yogananda teaches that “Our real self, the soul, is immortal.” This spiritual reality is one the speaker, in his present deep state of mourning, is incapable of accepting, because he remains immersed in the human experience of loss.
The speaker cannot yet see beyond the physical body lying upon the deck. The suffering speaker can touch the Captain, but he cannot awaken him. The victory is real, but so is the terrible absence of the man who made that victory possible.
Third Stanza: “My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still”
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult O shores, and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.
The third stanza finally forces the speaker to acknowledge the physical reality of Lincoln’s death. The claim “My Captain does not answer” leaves no room for the dream that he might awaken. All color has gone from his lips and his pulse has ceased.
The speaker again uses “My father,” emphasizing the intimate attachment that has made Lincoln’s death so devastating. The historical president has become, within the speaker’s emotional world, a beloved father whose absence cannot be compensated for by public celebration.
The ship, meanwhile, has reached safety. The statement “The ship is anchor’d safe and sound” is a direct confirmation that the Union has survived the Civil War. The voyage is “closed and done,” and the “victor ship” has arrived with the object of its struggle won.
The tragic paradox is now complete. Lincoln has accomplished the task represented by the voyage, but he has been denied the opportunity to witness the peaceful arrival of the ship. The nation has won, but its leader has fallen.
The command “Exult O shores, and ring O bells!” acknowledges the legitimate joy of the nation. The speaker does not ask the people to stop celebrating. Instead, he separates himself from them with the word “But.” They may rejoice; he must mourn.
This distinction is central to the poem’s identity as an elegy for Abraham Lincoln. The poem does not simply lament a dead man. It dramatizes the strange emotional condition of a nation that has achieved victory while simultaneously losing the man who led it through the crisis.
In “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman broadens Lincoln’s death into a contemplative musing upon universal mortality and the possibility of spiritual reconciliation.
The Library of Congress describes that poem as an elegy concerned with universal death and national healing, while “O Captain! My Captain!” concentrates more directly upon the public and personal grief surrounding Lincoln.
The final image returns to the deck. The speaker walks there with a “mournful tread,” remaining beside the body of the Captain while the nation celebrates. The physical movement is small, but emotionally it carries the full weight of the assassination.
The repetition of “Fallen cold and dead” gives the poem its final emotional blow. The Captain is not merely absent; he has fallen at the precise moment that the ship reaches safety. The repeated words therefore connect Lincoln’s death permanently with the nation’s victory.
Paramahansa Yogananda explains that death does not destroy the spiritual essence, stating that “the soul or spiritual essence of man is also indestructible.” Such a teaching provides a spiritual reality beyond the speaker’s immediate grief, although the speaker does not attempt to resolve his sorrow through such a doctrine at his point in his suffering.
Instead, the speaker remains upon the deck with Lincoln. The people on shore celebrate the end of the war, while the speaker remains emotionally attached to the fallen Captain. This separation gives the poem its extraordinary poignancy. The poem’s fame rests partly upon this directness.
The Library of Congress notes that it received immediate acclaim and became widely anthologized, while the Whitman Archive identifies it as Whitman’s most popular poem. Its enduring power comes from the simplicity with which it joins Lincoln’s national importance to the intimate sorrow of personal bereavement.
The speaker has created a Captain who is unmistakably Abraham Lincoln without ever naming him. The ship is the Union, the fearful voyage is the Civil War, the prize is victory, the port is peace, and the fallen Captain is the president, who did not live to enter that peaceful harbor.
Thus, “O Captain! My Captain!” remains Whitman’s most famous and perhaps his most immediately poignant elegy for Abraham Lincoln. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” reaches toward universal death and spiritual healing, while this poem remains deliberately close to the heartbreaking image of Lincoln lying dead upon the deck of the victorious Union.
The final paradox is therefore the poem’s deepest truth: the Captain has succeeded, but he has not survived his success. The ship has reached the harbor, but the man who guided it there is dead. The bells ring for victory while the speaker walks alone beside his fallen Captain.
Image: Image created by Grok inspired by the essay
Tom O’Bedlam: Mad Mendicant or Feigning Fraud?
The figure of Tom O’Bedlam remains one of the most enigmatic characters in English literary tradition—a wandering mendicant who is either mad or skillfully feigning madness, forever linked to the notorious Bethlem Royal Hospital and to the wild visionary speech of an anonymous seventeenth-century ballad.
Historical Origins of the Bedlamite
Tom O’Bedlam, also known as the Bedlam beggar or Abraham-man, emerged in Tudor and Stuart England as a recognizable social type. The name derives from Bethlem Royal Hospital—popularly called Bedlam—the ancient London asylum founded in the thirteenth century.
By the sixteenth century, the appellation “Tom O’Bedlam” designated those who claimed, truthfully or fraudulently, to have been discharged from the hospital and licensed to beg [1].
John Aubrey, the seventeenth-century antiquary, recorded that such figures once traveled the countryside wearing an armilla—a tin or iron band—about the left arm and carrying an ox-horn around the neck [2], which they sounded at cottage doors and used as a drinking vessel.
Whether genuine former patients or cunning impostors, these “poor Toms” became fixtures of the English landscape until the Civil Wars largely swept them from the roads [3].
Early rogue literature, beginning with John Awdeley’s Fraternitye of Vacabondes (1561), already catalogues “poor Tom” as one who “walketh bare armed, and bare legged, and faineth him selfe mad.” The figure therefore occupies a morally ambiguous space: simultaneously an object of pity and a symbol of calculated deception.
The Shakespeare Writer’s Appropriation inKing Lear
The Shakespeare writer seized upon this familiar type and transformed it into high tragedy. In King Lear, Edgar, the legitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, adopts the disguise of “Poor Tom” after being driven from his home by his brother’s treachery [4].
On the storm-swept heath, he presents himself as a Bedlam beggar, complete with the conventional speech of demonic persecution, grotesque appetites, and self-inflicted wounds.
The Shakespeare writer’s use of the figure is masterful. Edgar’s assumed madness allows him to speak truths that the court cannot hear and to accompany the genuinely deranged king in a landscape where all social order has collapsed.
The Bedlamite persona thus becomes a vehicle for exploring the thin boundary between feigned and real madness, between theatrical performance and authentic suffering. Edgar’s “Tom’s a-cold” refrain and his catalogues of foul fiends remain among the most haunting passages in the play.
The Anonymous Ballad: A Visionary Masterpiece
Yet the figure’s greatest literary monument is the anonymous poem commonly called “Tom O’Bedlam’s Song” or “From the Hag and Hungry Goblin” [5]. Probably composed in the early seventeenth century and preserved in manuscript sources such as the Giles Earle Song Book (circa 1615), the poem speaks in the first person of the mad beggar himself. Its structure—eight-line stanzas concluding with a four-line refrain—suggests it was originally sung as a ballad.
Harold Bloom has called it “the greatest anonymous lyric in the English language” [6]. The speaker moves from abject pleading for food and clothing to soaring, almost cosmic vision:
I know more than Apollo, For oft when he lies sleeping I see the stars at bloody wars In the wounded welkin weeping.
Here the madman claims a knowledge that surpasses the rational sun-god. The poem’s imagery—hag and goblin, the Book of Moons, the heavenly Farrier, the tourney “ten leagues beyond the wild world’s end”—creates a surreal landscape in which madness becomes a form of higher perception.
Robert Graves found in the ballad a “perfect compendium” of moon-goddess worship, while later readers have recognized its strange power to combine utter humility with vaulting arrogance [7].
Critical Reflection
What makes Tom O’Bedlam endure is precisely this dual nature. He is at once a historical curiosity of English vagrancy laws, a theatrical mask for self-preservation, and a poetic voice that dares to speak from the outer edge of sanity.
The figure forces the culture to confront uncomfortable questions: How do we distinguish genuine mental affliction from strategic performance? What truths become available only when the social mask is discarded? And why does the most “purely poetic” of anonymous English compositions arise from the mouth of a supposed lunatic?
In an age that still struggles with the treatment of mental illness and the spectacle of public suffering, Tom O’Bedlam remains disturbingly contemporary.
He wanders the literary landscape still—barefoot, horn in hand, singing of stars at war—reminding citizens that the boundary between the sane and the mad is thinner than the social order prefers to believe, and that the greatest poetry sometimes is thought to originate from the very places society has labeled Bedlam.
The Risk of Undeserved Admiration
In a culture wherein literary works—especially poetry—often suffer from misunderstandings and misinterpretation, the hoisting of a character such as Tom O’Bedlam is particularly troublesome. To elevate a figure whose defining traits are destitution, possible deception, and either genuine or performed lunacy into a cultural icon risks romanticizing mental affliction and social marginality.
The historical “poor Tom” was not a visionary sage but a product of harsh vagrancy laws, institutional neglect, and the street-level opportunism that preyed upon genuine suffering. Celebrating his voice as a source of higher wisdom can obscure the material realities of madness—poverty, isolation, exploitation, and the absence of effective care—and convert them into aesthetic spectacle.
If literature transforms the Bedlamite into a symbol of liberated perception or subversive truth-telling, it may inadvertently encourage a sentimental or voyeuristic attitude toward mental illness.
The danger is that the “mad beggar” becomes an archetype through which society flatters itself: we admire the poetic intensity while remaining comfortably distant from the actual conditions that produced such figures.
In this sense, the icon of Tom O’Bedlam can serve less as a call to empathy or reform than as a poetic convenience that aestheticizes the very suffering it appears to honor. A more responsible reading would keep the historical and clinical costs of that suffering clearly in view, refusing to let the allure of visionary language erase the human cost of the condition it describes.
Image a: Walt Whitman – Mathew Brady – Walt Whitman Archive
Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
Walt Whitman’s admiration for President Lincoln is dramatized in the poet’s elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” mourning the death while celebrating the presidency of the sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln.
Introduction and Text of “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
In Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” the speaker laments the death of President Lincoln, but he does much more than merely offer his own sad and melancholy state of mind.
This speaker creates a sacred myth through which he not only offers a tribute to the fallen president but also creates a symbolic triad that will henceforth bring readers’ and listeners’ attention to the momentous event.
The speaker also composes a “Death Carol,” in which rests the irony of elevating death from the lamentation it usually brings for a celebrated friend whom all suffering humanity can afford the fealty of welcome.
It might be observed that poet Walt Whitman sectioned his elegy into 16 parts, symbolizing the fact that Abraham Lincoln, the heroic subject of the poem, had served as the sixteenth president of the United States.
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
1
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring, Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west, And thought of him I love.
2
O powerful western fallen star! O shades of night—O moody, tearful night! O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star! O cruel hands that hold me powerless—O helpless soul of me! O harsh surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.
3 In the dooryard fronting an old farm-house near the white-wash’d palings, Stands the lilac-bush tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green, With many a pointed blossom rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love, With every leaf a miracle—and from this bush in the dooryard, With delicate-color’d blossoms and heart-shaped leaves of rich green, A sprig with its flower I break.
4
In the swamp in secluded recesses, A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush, The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding throat, Death’s outlet song of life, (for well dear brother I know, If thou wast not granted to sing thou would’st surely die.)
5
Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities, Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray debris, Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass, Passing the yellow-spear’d wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen, Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards, Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave, Night and day journeys a coffin
6
Coffin that passes through lanes and streets, Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land, With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black, With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing, With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night, With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads, With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces, With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn, With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin, The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these you journey, With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang, Here, coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig of lilac.
7
(Nor for you, for one alone, Blossoms and branches green to coffins all I bring, For fresh as the morning, thus would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.
All over bouquets of roses, O death, I cover you over with roses and early lilies, But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first, Copious I break, I break the sprigs from the bushes, With loaded arms I come, pouring for you, For you and the coffins all of you O death.)
8
O western orb sailing the heaven, Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I walk’d, As I walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night, As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night, As you droop’d from the sky low down as if to my side, (while the other stars all look’d on,) As we wander’d together the solemn night, (for something I know not what kept me from sleep,) As the night advanced, and I saw on the rim of the west how full you were of woe, As I stood on the rising ground in the breeze in the cool transparent night, As I watch’d where you pass’d and was lost in the netherward black of the night, As my soul in its trouble dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb, Concluded, dropt in the night, and was gone.
9
Sing on there in the swamp, O singer bashful and tender, I hear your notes, I hear your call, I hear, I come presently, I understand you, But a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detain’d me, The star my departing comrade holds and detains me.
10
O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved? And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone? And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?
Sea-winds blown from east and west, Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting, These and with these and the breath of my chant, I’ll perfume the grave of him I love.
11
O what shall I hang on the chamber walls? And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls, To adorn the burial-house of him I love?
Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes, With the Fourth-month eve at sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright, With floods of the yellow gold of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air, With the fresh sweet herbage under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific, In the distance the flowing glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there, With ranging hills on the banks, with many a line against the sky, and shadows, And the city at hand with dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys, And all the scenes of life and the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.
12
Lo, body and soul—this land, My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships, The varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light, Ohio’s shores and flashing Missouri, And ever the far-spreading prairies cover’d with grass and corn.
Lo, the most excellent sun so calm and haughty, The violet and purple morn with just-felt breezes, The gentle soft-born measureless light, The miracle spreading bathing all, the fulfill’d noon, The coming eve delicious, the welcome night and the stars, Over my cities shining all, enveloping man and land.
13
Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird, Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes, Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.
Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song, Loud human song, with voice of uttermost woe.
O liquid and free and tender! O wild and loose to my soul—O wondrous singer! You only I hear—yet the star holds me, (but will soon depart,) Yet the lilac with mastering odor holds me.
14
Now while I sat in the day and look’d forth, In the close of the day with its light and the fields of spring, and the farmers preparing their crops, In the large unconscious scenery of my land with its lakes and forests, In the heavenly aerial beauty, (after the perturb’d winds and the storms,) Under the arching heavens of the afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women, The many-moving sea-tides, and I saw the ships how they sail’d, And the summer approaching with richness, and the fields all busy with labor, And the infinite separate houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily usages, And the streets how their throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent—lo, then and there, Falling upon them all and among them all, enveloping me with the rest, Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the long black trail, And I knew death, its thought, and the sacred knowledge of death.
Then with the knowledge of death as walking one side of me, And the thought of death close-walking the other side of me, And I in the middle as with companions, and as holding the hands of companions, I fled forth to the hiding receiving night that talks not, Down to the shores of the water, the path by the swamp in the dimness, To the solemn shadowy cedars and ghostly pines so still.
And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me, The gray-brown bird I know receiv’d us comrades three, And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.
From deep secluded recesses, From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still, Came the carol of the bird.
And the charm of the carol rapt me, As I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night, And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.
Death Carol
Come lovely and soothing death, Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving, In the day, in the night, to all, to each, Sooner or later delicate death.
Prais’d be the fathomless universe, For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, And for love, sweet love—but praise! praise! praise! For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.
Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet, Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome? Then I chant it for thee, I glorify thee above all, I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.
Approach strong deliveress, When it is so, when thou hast taken them I joyously sing the dead, Lost in the loving floating ocean of thee, Laved in the flood of thy bliss O death.
From me to thee glad serenades, Dances for thee I propose saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee, And the sights of the open landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting, And life and the fields, and the huge and thoughtful night.
The night in silence under many a star, The ocean shore and the husky whispering wave whose voice I know, And the soul turning to thee O vast and well-veil’d death, And the body gratefully nestling close to thee.
Over the tree-tops I float thee a song, Over the rising and sinking waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide, Over the dense-pack’d cities all and the teeming wharves and ways, I float this carol with joy, with joy to thee O death.
15
To the tally of my soul, Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird, With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.
Loud in the pines and cedars dim, Clear in the freshness moist and the swamp-perfume, And I with my comrades there in the night.
While my sight that was bound in my eyes unclosed, As to long panoramas of visions.
And I saw askant the armies, I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags, Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc’d with missiles I saw them, And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody, And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,) And the staffs all splinter’d and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them, And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them, I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war, But I saw they were not as was thought, They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not, The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d, And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d, And the armies that remain’d suffer’d.
16
Passing the visions, passing the night Passing, unloosing the hold of my comrades’ hands, Passing the song of the hermit bird and the tallying song of my soul, Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying ever-altering song, As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night, Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy, Covering the earth and filling the spread of the heaven, As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses, Passing, I leave thee lilac with heart-shaped leaves, I leave thee there in the door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.
I cease from my song for thee, From my gaze on thee in the west, fronting the west, communing with thee, O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.
Yet each to keep and all, retrievements out of the night, The song, the wondrous chant of the gray-brown bird, And the tallying chant, the echo arous’d in my soul, With the lustrous and drooping star with the countenance full of woe, With the holders holding my hand nearing the call of the bird, Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well, For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake, Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul, There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
Commentary on “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
Walt Whitman was deeply affected by the assassination of President Lincoln on April 14, 1865. The poet’s admiration is dramatized in his elegy as it emphasizes three symbols: a lilac, a star, and a bird.
First Movement 1-6: Springtime when Lilacs Bloom
The speaker begins by setting the time frame in spring when lilacs bloom. He is in mourning and suggests that Americans will continue to mourn this time of year, when three events continue to come together: the lilacs bloom, the star Venus appears, and the speaker’s thoughts of the president he venerated return.
The lilacs and the star of Venus immediately become symbolic of the speaker’s feelings and the momentous event that has engendered them. In the second section of the first movement, the speaker offers a set of keening laments prefaced by “O”:
O powerful western fallen star! O shades of night—O moody, tearful night! O great star disappear’d—O the black murk that hides the star!
Each keen grows more intense as it progresses to the final, ” O hard surrounding cloud that will not free my soul.” He picks a sprig of lilac whose leaves are heart-shaped. This act indicates that the lilac will henceforth become symbolic for the speaker; the lilac will symbolize the love the speaker bears for the fallen president.
The speaker then introduces the singing hermit thrush whose song will elevate the bird to symbolic significance for the speaker, as well as the lilacs and star. In the final two sections of the first movement, the speaker describes the landscape through which President Lincoln’s casketed body moved to its final resting place in Illinois.
Second Movement 7: The Symbolic Offering
The second movement consists of a parenthetical offering of flowers to the casketed corpse of the president but also suggests that the speaker would overlay the coffins of all the war dead with roses and lilies, “But mostly and now the lilac that blooms the first.”
Again, the suggestion that the lilac will remain a symbol because it is the first flower to bloom every spring. While showering the coffins of the fallen, the speaker says he will “chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.”
Third Movement 8-9: The Star of Venus
The speaker now confronts the “western orb” that star of Venus that he had observed a month earlier. He imagines that the symbolic star had been speaking to him of the tragic events to come.
The star seemed to drop to the speaker’s side as the other stars watched. The speaker felt a sadness as the star “drops in the night, and was gone.” Now that the month has passed, the speaker feels that he was being forewarned by the symbolic star.
The speaker says that the “star of my departing comrade hold and detains me,” as he addresses the “singer bashful and tender,” that is, the hermit thrush who sings his solitary song from the covering of leaves.
Fourth Movement 10-13: A Personal Shrine to a Slain President
The speaker now muses on how he will be able to “warble . . . for the dead one there I loved.” He continues to lament but knows he must compose a “song for the large sweet soul that has gone.”
The speaker then considers what he will “hang on the chamber walls,” indicating he will erect a personal shrine to the slain president. He offers a number of items that he feels must decorate that shrine, as he catalogues them; for example, “Pictures of growing spring and farms and homes.”
The famous Whitman catalogue finds its way into several movements of this elegy. As it is the president of the country who has died, the speaker places scenes from the country in his elegy:
Lo, body and soul—this land, My own Manhattan with spires, and the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships, The varied and ample land, the South and the North in the light, Ohio’s shores and flashing Missouri, And ever the far-spreading prairies cover’d with grass and corn.
The speaker then commands the bird to sing as he prepares to offer a “Death Carol” in the next movement.
Fifth Movement 14: A Hymn to Death
The speaker creates a moving tribute to the president by replacing the sorrow of death with the dignity and necessity of death. Death becomes a friend who gives respite to the weary body—a fact often referenced by the “Father of Yoga in the West” Paramahansa Yogananda.
The speaker prefaces his “Death Carol” with a scene of himself walking between two friends: “knowledge of death” walked on one side of the speaker, and the “thought of death” occupied the other.
The “Death Carol” virtually lovingly addresses death, inviting it to “come lovely and soothing death.” He welcomes death to “undulate round the world.” He has almost fully accepted that death comes “in the day, in the night, to all, to each, / Sooner or later.”
The speaker’s lament has transformed death from a dreaded event to a sacred, sweet one to which he will float a song full of joy.
Sixth Movement 15-16: Entwining the Images and Symbols
The speaker credits the bird with the composition of the “Death Carol.” This crediting indicates that the speaker had become so closely in tune with the warbling bird that he cognizes a hymn from the singing.
The speaker then catalogues scenes that he had actually witnessed as he traveled the battlefields of the war during which time he had nursed the wounded and dying. He saw “battle-corpses, myriads of them.”
But he finally realizes something vital to the awareness of the reality of death: “. . . I saw they were not as was thought, / They themselves were fully at rest, they suffer’d not.” The speaker realized that it is the living who suffer the death of the deceased and not the deceased, who remained, “fully at rest.”
The speaker’s parting words offer his summation of the entwined images that now have become and will retain their symbolic significance for the speaker: “For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake, / Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul.”
