Topic 2: Some Lines from "The Second Coming" that are Meaningful to Me

I really liked all of the lines from the poem, as they all had special meaning and description behind them all, but there were a few that stood out to me more than others.

"The falcon cannot hear the falconer" (line 2)
For some reason, this line really sparked some thought in my mind. The falconer is the person who leads the falcon, and tells it what to do, and where to go. I saw two sides to this line. One is that, once the falcon cannot hear its orders, it doesn't know what to do. It is completely helpless and out of control. The second side is from the view of the falconer. Its duty, its job, is to be a leader and guide to the falcon, but now that the falcon cannot hear him, his efforts are pointless. He fails to do his job because it can't work. He no longer has purpose. I just thought that there was so much to think about in one single line, which is why I found this line meaningful.

"The ceremony of innocence is drowned" (line 6)
I really liked, I guess you could say, the connection of water used in this line. Water, which can be used for cleansing the spirit, as in Baptism (the ceremony of innocence), and water, which can be used for harmful purposes, such as killing by drowning. This line is meaningful to me because it shows that, what may at first seem good, can be turned around and become something terrible. The cleansing ceremony is killed by its own strength. And with that, comes the death of innocence.

"The best lack all convinction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity" (lines 7, 8)
I just thought that this line was an interesting way of  saying that evil people are taking over while the good people stay silent and do nothing. I extremely liked the use of the words "conviction" and "passionate intensity." Conviction is opinion or trust. When it is lacked by someone, they do not get a say in anything, and if they did say something, others would not believe them, or have trust in them. Passionate intensity means that someone is forceful with great passion or strong feelings. Basically, I believe Yeats is saying that the best of people don't try to change things, and even if they did, nobody else would listen to them. He says that the worst of people are the ones with the strength and determination to get power and get people to listen to them and obey them.

"A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" (lines 14, 15)
I touched base on this in the previous post, in which I described how the combination of the lion body and the human head is truly horrific. I found the way Yeats hid this in the literature extremely clever and interesting. The spirit that people think will come to save them is only a cruel killer, completely aware of what it does. A killler that shows no emotion for doing that. Pitiless as the sun. He does not care for the harm that he inflicts on others, even though he knows exactly how terrible it is.