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What Rough Beast: Neo-African Literature and the Force of Social Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2021

William Cook
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Extract

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 5
      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. 10
      The Second Comingl 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, 15
      Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
      Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
      The darkness drops again; but I know
      That twenty centuries of stony sleep
      Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 20
      And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
      Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
      William Butler Yeats

Chinua Achebe in 1959 turned to the above poem by Yeats, with its prophecy of the approach of a new age, for the title to his first novel. Ezekiel Mphalhlele in the same year chose lines seven and eight of the same powm as the epigraph to his autobiographical Down Second Avenue. This convergence upon one of the most foreboding images in modern poetry is not an accident. Both writers saw their own experiences of loss of order and future debilitation confirmed within the lines of Yeat’s apocalyptic poem. Viewed within the context of Yeats’ theory of 2000-year gyres, this vision becomes even more ominous.

Type
Research Article
Information
African Issues , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , Winter 1978 , pp. 53 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1978 

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References

Notes

1. Yeats, William Butler, “The Second Coming,” in The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats (New York: Macmillian Publishing Co., Inc., 1924)Google Scholar.

2. William, B. Yeats quoted in Richard Ellman, Yeats—The Man and the Masks (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1948), p. 291 Google Scholar.

3. Ellman, Yeats, p. 228.

4. Parrinder, Geoffrey, African Traditional Religion (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 143 Google Scholar.

5. Ibid., p. 146.

6. Robert Farris, Thompson, Black Gods and Kings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 2/2Google Scholar.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Edwin, Smith quoted in Harold Collins, “Cry, The Beloved Country and the Broken Tribe,” in Sheridan Baker, ed., Cry, The Beloved Country: The Novel, The Critics, The Setting (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1968), p. 139 Google Scholar.

10. Collins, p. 139.

11. Laye, Camara, The Dark Child (New York: Farrar, , Straus, , and Giroux, , 1954), pp. 142–143 Google Scholar.

12. Ibid., pp. 128-129.

13. Camara, Laye, The Radiance of the King (New York: Collier Books, 1971), p. 246 Google Scholar. (This novel will be referred to henceforth as Radiance.)

14. Radiance, p. 248.

15. Radiance, p. 252.

16. Radiance, p. 33.

17. Radiance, p. 13.

18. Ibid.

19. Radiance, p. 16.

20. Radiance, pp. 19-20.

21. Laye, Camara, A Dream of Africa (New York: Collier Books, 1971), pp. 130–132 Google Scholar.

22. Ibid., p. 167.

23. Ibid., p.89.

24. Achebe, Chinua, No Longer at East (Greenwich: Fawcett Books, 1960), p. 42 Google Scholar.

25. Ibid., p. 57.

26. Ibid., p.156.

27. Ibid., p.142.

28. Achebe, Chinua, A Man of the People (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1966), p. 136 Google Scholar.

29. Ibid.,p.10.

30. Eliot, T. S., “The Journey of the Magi,” in Coffin, The Major Poets , p. 504 Google Scholar.

31. Stevens, Wallace, “Cuisine Bourgeoise,” in Oscar, Williams and Edwin, Honig, eds., The Mentor Book of Major American Poets (New York: Mentor Books, 1962), p. 292 Google Scholar.

32. Ayi Kwei, Armah, The Beauty ful Ones Are Not Yet Born (New York. Collier Books, 1969), pp. 12–13 Google Scholar.

33. Ibid., pp. 104-105.

34. Ibid.,p.10.

35. Ibid., p. 79.

36. Ibid., p. 152.

37. Ibid., p. 180.

38. Chinua, Achebe, “Colonialist Criticism,” in Morning Yet on Creation Day (Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1976), pp. 9–10 Google Scholar.

39. Ibid.,p.19.

40. Ezekiel, Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1971), p. 205 Google Scholar.

41. Ibid., p. 207.