Analysis of The Second Coming, 2024
After William Butler Yeats
Spinning and dancing in a flame-licked gyre
The phoenix need not court this massacre;
Life falls apart; the biosphere curls and folds;
hydrocarbons stoke a heat-struck world,
The ice-bled tide is unloosed, and everywhere
The illusions of humanity are drowned;
The best rue their predictions, while the worst
Admonish greed and inequality.
Surely some resolution is at hand;
Surely geo-engineering is at hand.
Geo-engineering! Hardly is that term out
When a vast image of a white elephant
Troubles my sight: somewhere in a spreading desert
A shape with pinched body and a tusk-riven head,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is dragging wasted thighs, while all about it
Ashes leap to form the immortal firebird.
Harsh rainfall clouds confound; for now I know
That twenty selfish centuries weep
Vexed to nightmare by a smoking chimney,
And a consumptive feast: their issue, come at last,
Reels for some Eden as it burns.
Scheme | X AAXXAXXB CCXXXXXXXXXBXX |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 1010101 1001000111 0101111100 1101010101 01010111 011111010 00101010011 0111010101 010100100 101010111 10101010111 101010101111 10110101100 10111001010 011110001101 0110100101 11010111011 10111001010 111011111 110101001 111101010 0011110111 11110111 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 952 |
Words | 171 |
Sentences | 6 |
Stanzas | 3 |
Stanza Lengths | 1, 8, 14 |
Lines Amount | 23 |
Letters per line (avg) | 33 |
Words per line (avg) | 7 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 255 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 52 |
About this poem
The poem is inspired by the likely permanent loss of the UK's gentle, temperate climate from 2024, due to exceptional sea surface temperatures, El Nino, reduced sea ice and aerosols.
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"The Second Coming, 2024" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 11 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/163980/the-second-coming%2C-2024>.
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