The Dresden Files > DF Reference Collection
References to Yeats' The Second Coming and the BAT (CD spoilers)
wizard nelson:
--- Quote from: marc baggins on January 26, 2013, 03:03:42 AM ---From the last page of Storm Front, 227 in the Wizard for Hire omnibus edition.
The world is getting weirder. Darker every single day. Things are spinning around faster and faster, and threatening to go completely awry. Falcons and falconers. The center cannot hold.
Ladies and gentlemen, I believe we have the Dresdenverse's earliest Second Coming reference.
--- End quote ---
not an english buff, never read yeats, but that page seemed odder than heck when i read it.
Elegast:
--- Quote from: Cenphx on January 25, 2013, 06:26:18 PM --- When I read the end of CD and Maeve mentions that she will not be Mab’s falcon anymore, I realized that it was at least the third similar reference I felt like I could remember reading in TDF. I knew that there was some poem out there about how the center cannot hold and things fall apart, about entropy and the end of the world. Finally I decided to figure it out. Here is the poem—it’s from William Butler Yeats and it’s titled “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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?
Doesn't this sound like it could be applied to the DF apocalpyse? I’m no Yeats scholar, but in a bit of googling I came across the fact that Yeats spent years crafting an elaborate, mystical theory of the universe. This theory issued in part from Yeats’s lifelong fascination with the occult and mystical. He believed that history can be laid out as two conical spirals, one inside the other, so that the widest part of one of the spirals rings around the narrowest part of the other spiral, and vice versa. Yeats believed that this image (he called the spirals “gyres”) captured the contrary motions inherent in history. Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalypse, as history reached the end of the outer gyre and began moving along the inner gyre. In other words, the world’s trajectory along the gyre of science and democracy was coming apart, like the frantically widening flight of the falcon that has lost contact with the falconer; the next age will take its character not from the gyre of science and democracy, but something else entirely and opposite. Of course, the poem was written around 1921 and so likely had more to do with WW1 than predicting the DF apocalypse to come :D, but it’s kind of cool to think about the possibility that Yeats, like the DF version of Stoker and Lovecraft, may have understood more than the rest of the world.
Also, rather than just being a sad echo of my days as an english major, I started this thread to see if anyone picked up on these or other references. IIRC, Murphy said something to Harry in SF or FM about how the center cannot hold. I think Harry mentions “falcons and falconers” at some point, but I have no idea where. And then we have Maeve in CD telling Mab she will not be her falcon anymore.
Are there anymore potential “The Second Coming” references in the Dresden Files? Anyone care to formulate a WAG about Yeats being prophetic??
--- End quote ---
That's so cool. 8)
madness:
Thanks for this thread. The first half dozen lines of the poem were familiar to me but I am not sure that I had read the entire thing before.
I wonder if Yeats was the first in literature to use the phrase 'the center can not hold' or if he was referencing something older. I have seen the concept referenced all over the place - I would have guessed that it was a much older phrase.
Elegast:
It was already on Wikipedia... :o
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Second_Coming_(poem)&diff=522176648&oldid=521430009
the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh:
--- Quote from: madness on January 27, 2013, 10:28:17 PM ---I wonder if Yeats was the first in literature to use the phrase 'the center can not hold' or if he was referencing something older. I have seen the concept referenced all over the place - I would have guessed that it was a much older phrase.
--- End quote ---
I don't think Yeats was referencing anything earlier, and I used to be pretty well up on this, Making up things that sound so right you believe they've always been around is the mark of a great poet; a really remarkable number of common English phrases were made up from whole cloth by Shakespeare.
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