The Barbaric Yawp Project

◆Irish Literature ◆Poet ◆Prophecy ◆Twentieth Century Poetry

William Yeats

1865-1939

In many traditions — older and wiser than our own about the relationship between the living and the dead — the ancestors are not gone. They are available. They have lived through earlier versions of our current conflicts. They carry a knowledge that the living cannot carry because the living are inside the moment and the moment is too loud to hear anything else. The Barbaric Yawp Project calls out to our ancestors and asks them to speak to us from their own hard-won perspectives about what is happening now. It is a work of collective active imagination in which each individual contribution is an act of creative witnessing in the voice of an ancestral figure based on their documented life, values, and legacy to the present moment. I like to think of these barbaric yawps as elegies from the dead to the living in our troubled times. For this yawp I turned to William Butler Yeats who wrote The Second Coming in January 1919. World War One--The Great War--had just ended with ten million dead and the old European order dissolved in mud and gas. The Russian Revolution had begun. The Irish were preparing to kill each other with serious purpose. Yeats felt something large and terrible gathering. He had spent years developing a theory of history he called “the gyres” — great spinning cycles, interlocking cones of force that widened and narrowed in two-thousand-year turns, carrying one civilization out and bringing the next one in. He believed that the gyre of Christian civilization had reached its widest point and that its center could no longer hold. He also believed that that something was coming to fill the vacuum left by the dissolution of its center. He called it “the rough beast.” He did not know its name. He knew its nature; born not from heaven but from the accumulated pressure of the widening — from the drowning of what he called “the ceremony of innocence”, from the loosening of constraint, from the hunger that fills the space where order used to be. He was right. In the years that followed he watched the beast rise in Germany, in Italy, in Spain. He died in 1939, before the full flowering of the “rough beast” — which was perhaps a mercy. The gyres do not stop because the poet dies. The wheel turns without the watcher. And now it seems that the wheel has turned again — not in Europe, not in the exhausted aftermath of war, but in the country that called itself the exception to history, the nation that believed the gyre did not apply to it, that the center would hold because it was American and America was different. It is not different. What Yeats saw gathering over Europe in 1919 we can see gathering over America now. The falcon is over America. The master’s whistle scatters in the crosswinds, and the falcon does not heed. Grievance marches in ceremonial armor. The crowd lifts its face to spectacle. What follows is conceived in Yeats’ spirit, with his imagery, through the lens of his gyre. We are hearing how our imaginative Yeats might give voice to the present American moment as clearly as Yeats himself gave voice to his original The Second Coming. We are looking at America today through the eyes with which Yeats saw the world in the early twentieth century.

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This video is an AI-generated active imagination of what might be said to us today based on the written historical record.

A Barbaric Yawp in the Spirit of Yeats’ The Second Coming: The Gyre Turns Over America

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The gyre widens. It widens beyond command. The falcon wheels in a bright and thinning sky, its cry unanswered, its master’s whistle scattered in crosswind. The center loosens — not shattered in thunder, but drained. Grain by grain, trust thins. Restraint frays. The pillars stand — yet bear less weight. Across the square, torches flare. Grievance marches in ceremonial armor, visor gleaming with moral certainty. It calls itself patriot. It names itself destiny. It feeds on applause. Crowds lift their faces to spectacle. They cheer the iron syllable. They delight in the single will. They prefer the shout to the sentence. Language combusts. Enemy. Traitor. Fraud. Words fall like meteors, burning through kinship and custom alike. The outer gyre spins faster. In its widening turn, moderation is mocked, law recast as inconvenience, memory bent toward usefulness. An ancient pattern stirs. Not foreign. Not imported from desert or sea. Native. Born of impatience with doubt, of boredom with complexity, of hunger for a hand that promises to decide. The spiral tightens at its hidden core. Each age fashions its herald. And now — in this turning — a shadow gathers beneath the marble and the myth. Not horned in fantasy alone, but mantled in grievance, crowned in spectacle, fattened on loyalty. The better angels retreat to dimmer rooms. And in the widening dark a line resounds — half memory, half prophecy: And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? It does not descend from heaven. It rises from permission. It lumbers forward on the strength of our indulgence, on the rhythm of our applause. Not apocalypse from beyond — but consequence from within. For the gyre obeys motion. If we feed it fury, it yields combustion. If we enthrone grievance, it crowns dominion. The wheel turns. It turns toward heat. It turns toward a dawn that may not be dawn. Yet still — at the innermost hinge of the turning — a narrow stillness remains. A point not yet surrendered. There, citizens remember that republics perish not only by invasion but by enchantment. There, they steady the axis. For if the center, though battered, holds, the spiral may yet narrow. But if it yields — if spectacle becomes sovereign and fury virtue — then history will not say that we were conquered. It will say we turned. And did not turn back.

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