Ceci n'est pas une question

[MarcA]

This is something that's bothered me for a while.

Why is the last line in Yeats' The Second Coming a question? That is - it doesn't seem like a question to me, grammatically or semantically.

The speaker comes away from the vision knowing the identity of the beast that is going to Bethlehem. He's not asking - he's telling us he knows, dammit.

Alright. Let me have it.

- Marc



The Second Coming
W. B. 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 convictions, 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 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?

[Monk Bretton]

Hello,

My view is that it is, essentially, a rhetorical question (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question). Punctuation, the squiggles and sigils by which writers convey 'tone of voice' onto the page, has not developed a system for representing such subtleties as ‘rhetorical questions’ satisfactorily. Some internet users use a question mark followed by an exclamation mark to represent a rhetorical question, viz. “are you insane?!” but it hasn’t caught on in civilised circles and, certainly, was unknown in Yeats’ days. Occasionally people punctuate rhetorical questions without questions marks. This, too, is considered erroneous. As it stood Yeats had no option but to punctuate the sentence in the way he did.




The speaker comes away from the vision knowing the identity of the beast that is going to Bethlehem. He's not asking - he's telling us he knows, dammit.


In fact he claims not to know! He mentions his own personal vision of what the second coming means: ”Hardly are those words out when a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi…” etc. But he leaves that as a purely person image. He asks the reader to supply his or her own image, independent of his. As it is, so powerful is his image, it leaves little room for the reader to supply his or her own but his rhetorical construction does, at least, ask the reader to supply their own image. It is a rather nifty piece of assumed humility on the part of Yeats the poet

Regards,

Drunken Monk

[Dunc]

And of course Yeats was a magician 'of the Western Tradition'. In London in 1890 he joined a mystic society called The Golden Dawn, and pursued his old concern to contact spirits so as to learn the correct magic rituals and receive understanding. His friend and co-Dawner MacGregor Mathers became mentor to the infamous Aleister Crowley, whose bid for control forced Yeats to organize the expulsion of both of them, and take over leadership. When Mr and Mrs Horos, Golden Dawn members, started their own Order and caused a very public scandal in 1901 by using it for sex and extorsion, the Golden Dawn had to change its name to Stella Matutina (= Morning Star). And Yeats had to distance himself publicly from the Order while he launched his Abbey Theatre. But I digress.

The point is that when you read The Second Coming (1921), you're entitled to wonder if the 'rough beast' is the post-Christian, indeed pagan and magical, New Dawn that he believed would occur; and if he hinted at that by using a rhetorical question because he knew it would be impolitic to say it out loud. Regards / Dunc

[MarcA]

[...]and if he hinted at that by using a rhetorical question because he knew it would be impolitic to say it out loud.

I see how it could be a rhetorical question, but the grammatical problem remains:

"I know that dinner's at 8, and who's coming?"

In my dialect of English (Merkin), that sounds wrong. "But" would sound more natural as the conjunction connecting a statement and a question.

"I know that dinner's at 8, but who's coming?"

"... now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
but what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

[Dunc]

I personally don't feel there's a problem. See if a semi-colon after 'cradle' instead of a comma helps. Regards / Dunc

[MarcA]

"I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out." -- Oscar Wilde.

I'm apparently guilty of the opposite.

Dunc, I'll mentally dot that comma every time I come across it, and remember the important lesson here: "It's not the punctuation, stupid."

Thanks for the tip.

- Marc