Literary Journal: Allusion

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Allusion

A reference to a historical, spiritual, or traditional activity or event used to increase the effect of the speaker’s purpose.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,”
(from “The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats)

Yeats’ use of a falcon allusion provides the necessary image and symbol to support his beliefs. While some of his beliefs (the Spiritus Mundi, the world has two-thousand-year cycles) may seem far-fetched, the allusion serves to align all his beliefs together. With the destruction asso-ciated with World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917, Yeats believed that the world was on the brink of the Apocalypse. All of history’s events in the two thousand years between Jesus’ death and the present were “turning and turning in the widening gyre” and would eventually all be sucked out into nothing. The allusion relates this to the falcon; just as the falcon cannot hear the falconer and thus breaks free after it has gone too far away, so will the earth break into anarchy due to all of society’s problems. The center of the gyre is the falconer, or the Earth, and it can represent morals and values. The widening circles taken by the falcon, or society, can represent how humans are increasingly become more savage and destructive. If this process continues, then “things [will] fall apart.” Yeats closely associated this sort of chaos with destruc-tive war associated with World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917. In his eyes, these events were stark changes from normal life and thus could only mean Armageddon. However, thinking about the big, and thus irreligious, picture, Yeats’ prediction of the world falling apart is a result of lack of morals. Thus, Yeats’ views this era as a testing time where the battle be-tween sin and good was at an all time high. Reforms in society and in people need to be made to preserve mankind from Armageddon.