The Second Coming
(1920)
William Butler Yeats

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: somewhere in the sands of the desert

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

Reel 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?

With three episodes to go, David Chase has given us Yeats’s “The Second Coming” as the framework for the end of The Sopranos. Tony’s son AJ is reading it in one of the college classes he is taking; he is also using it as the text for his own life and the life of his family. His attempt to fight depression with anger during the last episode was short-lived; when his cohort of young mobsters beat up a black man; their vicious racism somehow threatens his former fiancee Blanca, whom he still loves.

AJ’s anti-depressants seem to have stopped working; he is overwhelmed by the “mere anarchy . . . loosed upon the world” (in the form of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which he is studying in a second course). Unable to deal with the pain, hopeless about making a difference, he attempts to drown himself in the family swimming pool, its frigid waters covered over for the winter.

“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.”

Speaking of the worst, Tony saves him, trying desperately to protect his son, but also deeply ashamed of his weakness. After AJ is hospitalized he and Carmela trade barbs about whose genes are responsible for the mental fragility of their son.

The second half of the poem evokes last week’s episode, which ended with Tony in the Las Vegas desert, watching the sun rise, with a primal sense of his own power and absolutely no pity for Christopher, whom he just killed.

“[S]omewhere in the sans of the desert
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
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.”

Tony has somehow lost his humanity, he’s become something else. . . you can see it in his eyes.

“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.” We are about to have an all-out war between the New Jersey mob and the New York mob. A member of the latter grossly insulted Tony’s daughter while she was out at a restaurant in Manhattan; Tony nearly killed the guy in retaliation. Phil, the new head of the New York mob, is not likely to compromise on an asbestos removal scam the two families are working on together; there are old resentments. Tony’s cousin killed Phil’s brother; Phil has never forgiven Tony for not turning the cousin over to Phil for torture. (Instead, Tony mercy-killed him with a shot gun blast). This latest incident with the member of his crew only reopened old wounds – or perhaps Phil set it up so that he could have an excuse to go to war. It’s senseless and hopeless; AJ’s remark earlier in the episode about the senselessness and hopelessness of the Middle East conflict echos in the audience’s mind when we see the beginnings of this new war.

“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.
“

“The Second Coming” is an interesting choice for two reasons. First, the title and the imagery obviously evokes Christianity’s belief in the “second coming’ of Jesus–an event which will be marked by absolute power combined with just judgment and mercy. Yet, in Yeats’s poem, what is coming is not Christ–it is the inauguration of a new age, a new two millennia, marked by something utterly different and unknown. We have no reason to expect that the “rough beast” will provide either justice nor mercy as they are understood and appreciated in the Christian era that is passing, any more than the pagans had reason to expect that Christians would enact the old pagan values and virtues when they took power.

Second, the poem is an amalgam of the organically developed and the constructed. More specifically, it combines Christian themes developed over centuries with the mythological worldview constructed by Yeats himself, drawing in part on the occult and late nineteenth century theosophical mysticism. I think, in a way, the world of the Sopranos is a similar amalgam of the organically developed and constructed; creator David Chase is building upon mob lore, but recasting it, reshaping it, and reinterpreting it for his own purposes in the creation of his own mythology.

Who is the “rough beast?” Is it Tony, who’s about to be reborn in his death? Or is it something else –something larger, with implications for the world he will leave behind? I think the latter – in part because I think it has to do with the subplot of fundamentalist Muslim terrorists. But I can’t be sure.
Two weeks until the next episode.