By WB Yeats
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.
Reference :- The given lines have been taken from the poem ‘The Second Coming’, written and published by one of the foremost poet William Butler Yeats in 1920.
Context :- The poem describes about the coming of a lay to her own house after a long time on someone’s death. There is a relief on the face due to her returning. She is quite happy with her returning. In the poem, there is a contrast between natural and supernatural, love and hate, war and peace and subjective and objective.
Explanation:– The above mention lines are presenting determinism. The end of an age which always receives of the characters of the next age is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of the greatest expansion and the other to that of the greatest contradiction. Something disastrous has happened in modern civilization. Through the falcon, Yeats suggests the Eleanor of cruelty and terror found in the modern time. There is complete chaos and nor restraint.
This age is such that the best cannot do anything even the nobles are futile. It is indeed a sheerly destructive age. This shows the loneliness of a human but till she is happy as she is in her own house.
Critical Comment :- In the poem, because of its stunning, violent, imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, The Second Coming is one of the Yeats most popular and most anthologized poems. It is also one of the most thematically obscure and difficult to understand. The poem may not have the thematic relevance of Yeats’s best work and may not be a poem with which many people can personally identify; but the aesthetic experience of its passionate language is powerful enough to ensure its value and its importance in Yeats’s work as a whole.
The Literary World 