An overview and exposition of [[W.B. Yeats]]' famous poem The Second Coming and its parallels in [[The Sopranos]].

Got a really cool idea to make [[hyper-poetry]] out of The Second Coming. Also, the foreshadowings of the poem's themes with peyote in the desert was pretty cool.

The writing is really strong. Sopranos spoilers.

On the most recent episode of The Sopranos, a morbid A.J. Soprano—suffering from depression after a breakup—is roused from his torpor when a professor teaches W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” to his class. The poem’s prophetic intensities move A.J. to contemplate the violence of conflict in the Middle East and the general horror of a world in which the old orders are collapsing around him at every turn. He even reads the poem aloud in bed; shortly afterward, he tries to commit suicide.

On a broader level, the poem reflects the mystical theory of the universe that Yeats spent much of his life crafting. The “gyre” of the poem’s opening lines refers to Yeats’ theory of history set out in A Vision, an occult book that some critics find laughable.

In Yeats’ view, [[history]] consists of a double cone or vortex that meets at a central point and spins back out again (“the widening gyre” of the poem’s first line).

He thinks this happens every 2,000 years, with Christ being the last one (thus, on its way now.)

It is not something Christlike that returns, but an ambiguous rough beast-- thought to mean that "on a basic level “The Second Coming” is a prediction that the age of Christian history will soon be over."

This episode and the one before it artfully weave together a set of images that correspond loosely to the poem: A.J. tries to drown himself (“the ceremony of innocence is drowned”); Tony took peyote in Las Vegas and experienced a vision in the desert in dialogue with the poem’s transforming vision of a sphinx rousing itself in the sands. (For Tony, as in the poem, the vision is a kind of collective unconscious memory.) And of course as The Sopranos slouches toward its close, its writers have been leading us to believe that something apocalyptic is going to happen—building a mood of menacing gloom.

Re the doom: "“The morning of the day I got sick, I been thinking: It’s good to come in something from the ground floor. I came in too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” Melfi responds: “Many Americans, I think, feel that way.”"

Filed in: [[Literature Notes]]

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