ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -The symbol of the interlocking gyres reveals Yeats’s belief in fate and historical determinism as well as his spiritual attitudes toward the development of the soul, since creatures and events must evolve according to the conical shape.

Detailed explanation-2: -In “The Second Coming, ” the gyre represents a growing storm that grows larger and more powerful and threatens to wreak destruction. Europe at the time had just gone through the convulsions of World War I, and in Yeats’s native Ireland, the Easter Rising was being followed by the Irish war for independence.

Detailed explanation-3: -The falcon is described as “turning” in a “widening gyre” until it can no longer “hear the falconer, ” its human master. A gyre is a spiral that expands outward as it goes up. Yeats uses the image of gyres frequently in his poems to describe the motion of history toward chaos and instability.

Detailed explanation-4: -The ‘gyre’ metaphor Yeats employs in the first line (denoting circular motion and repetition) is a nod to Yeats’s mystical belief that history repeats itself in cycles.

Detailed explanation-5: -Yeats uses this image in the very first line of the poem: the falcon is turning in the gyre and can no longer hear the falconer.