A Discourse on The Waste Land and "The Second Coming" from the Perspective on the Coming Days

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to survey the perspective of the coming days of those two poets, Yeats and Eliot, comparing "The Second Coming" and The Waste Land. Both Yeats's "Second Coming" and Eliot's The Waste Land present a renewal process, but each one focuses on different goals and subjects; Eliot on a particular person's transformation, whereas Yeats predicts a switch of the entire world as a result of an escalation of chaos. And while Yeats attempts to present a definite picture of what he believes will happen at the time of this renovation, as a human being, lack of foresight leaves him to conclude with nothing more than an unanswerable question. Eliot, on the other hand, uses ambiguity to support and develop his theme: death is the way to rebirth. But for Eliot this rebirth, which must be necessarily obscure and extremely perplexing to the newly-born. In contrast, Yeats maintains a pessimistic tone created by his futility on the bleak situation. Though the two poets see the present similarly, their religious differences cause them to view the future differently, consequently Eliot's The Waste Land has a much more hopeful theme than Yeats's "The Second Coming."