Falcon and Falconer: "The Second Coming" and Marvell's "Horatian Ode"

Author(s): Murray Pittock

Source: Irish University Review, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 175-181
Published by: Edinburgh University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25477638
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Murray Pittock

Falcon and Falconer: "The Second Coming"

and Marvell's "Horatian Ode"

The image of falcon and falconer in English poetry is a rare one,

considering the part both used to play in the sporting life of the
nobility. Marvell's "Horatian Ode" and Yeats's "The Second
Coming" seem to be the only two poems of importance in which
it occurs. It seems strange, then, that a connexion between the two
poems has not been more often postulated. It is my intention in
this article to draw attention to the links between these two
poems, which go beyond mere verbal similarities into the context
of both authors' attitude to their subject.
The standard explanation of Yeats's use of the image is that
offered by A. Norman Jeff ares in A New Commentary on the
Poems of W.B. Yeats. Jeffares writes:

. . . these lines may derive from Dante's description of how

he and Virgil reached the eighth circle of Hell seated on
Geryon's back. In Cary's translation Geryon moves in wheel
ing gyres.. }

This seems satisfactory enough. Yeats's long obsession with the

occult and arcane can be held to set the seal on such an explana
tion. And yet, why the falcon and the falconer? Jon Stall worthy,
in his discussion of "The Second Coming" in Between the Lines,
admits that "The falcon has long been a problem",2 but pays no
attention to the falconer. However, in discussing the drafts of
Yeats's poem, Stallworthy makes it clear that the poet's subject
was originally a good deal more specific than it later became.
Originally Yeats seemed to have the death of the Russian royal
family in mind: he writes "Of innocence most foully put to death"
"while the mobs fawn upon the murderer", and earlier that "The
germons are f ) now to Russia come/ Though every day some
innocent has died".3 Stallworthy remarks that:

1. A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats, (London:

Macmillan, 1984), p. 203.
2. Jon Stall worthy, Between the Lines: Yeats's Poetry in the Making (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 18.
3. Stallworthy, pp. 17,19.

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

... I think it not impossible that Yeats, with his reverence

for the aristocratic virtues epitomized by Castiglione, had in
mind the fate of the Russian Royal House . . .4

The early stages in the development of the poem are thus seen as
another chapter in Yeats's defence of aristocratic values, with
special reference to the brutal fate of the Romanovs.
Such contemporary references are effectively marginalized in
the final version of the poem into the phrase "The ceremony of
innocence".5 But it is clear that the values Yeats is defending in
"The Second Coming" stay true to their roots in his drafts. I
believe that the implications of these values for the initial images
of the poem have not been adequately explored.
Yeats's love for great houses and families, so clear from Pur
gatory, and his poems on Coole and Lissadell (Poems, p. 263),6
is combined with a detestation of modern, "Whig" values (Poems,
pp. 271, 371). One of the originators of these values is Cromwell,
a hated figure in Irish history:

I came on a great house in the middle of the night,

Its open lighted doorway and its windows all alight,
And all my friends were there and made me welcome too;
But I woke in an old ruin that the winds howled through . . .
("The Curse of Cromwell": Poems, p. 351 ; //. 25-28)

Cromwell is here seen as guilty of the ultimate crime of Pur

gatory: the "capital offence" of killing a great house.7
As a counterweight to this assessment of Cromwell, Yeats was
enthusiastic for the attitudes to the great house evinced by Ben
Jonson.8 Occasionally, Yeats makes such sympathy explicit:

But inwardly, surmise companions

Beyond the fling of the dull ass's hoof
? Ben Jonson s phrase ? and find when June is come

4. Ibid., p. 19.
5. W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1950), p. 211.
All further references in the text are to this edition.

6. W.B. Yeats, The Collected Plays (London, Macmillan, 1952), pp. 679ff; Collected
Poems, pp. 263, 273, 275.
7. W.B. Yeats, Collected Plays,?. 683; Collected Poems, p. 351.
8. Ben Jonson, Works, ed. C.H. Herford, Percy and Evelyn Simpson, Vol. VIII,
The Poems and the Prose Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), p. 93.

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 FALCON AND FALCONER

At Kyle-na-no under that ancient roof

A sterner conscience and a friendlier home . . .
(Epilogue to Responsibilities', Poems, p. 143; //. 4-8)

Yeats's attitudes to both Ben Jonson and Cromwell betray an

involvement with a seventeenth-century context, its relevance to
political issues made all the clearer when one remembers that Jon
son was a eulogist of King Charles.9 In this context, it does not
seem absurd that Yeats, the only major political poet since Marvell,
should turn to the ambivalence of the "Horatian Ode" for some of
the imagery on which "The Second Coming", his great poem of
political violation, depended. Apart from anything else, the associ
ation of Cromwell with Antichrist had been around since the
seventeenth century, and had recently been revived by writers
such as M.R. James,10 and the neo-Jacobites of the Eighteen
Nineties, who had regarded Charles as "a canonised saint".11
Cromwell's position in Irish demonology only serves to reinforce
the appropriateness of this interpretation.
Marvell himself had associated the great dictator with ambivalent
apocalyptic imagery:

And, like the three-fork'd Lightning, first

Breaking the Clouds where it was nurst,
Did thorough his own Side
His fiery way divide.12
(//. 13-16)

The piercing of the "Side" carries uneasy overtones of the piercing

of Christ's side, except here the cause is "adventrous War" (line
11 ), rather than that of the Prince of Peace.
Just as Cromwell kills Charles, and presents the state with "A
bleeding Head" (Marvell /. 60), so Yeats refers to "The Blood
dimmed tide" (Yeats /, 5), a phrase even more understandable if
we think of an original reference to the Russian royal family. As a
result of Cromwell's presentation of Charles's head to the state,
". . . the Irish are asham'd/ To see themselves in one Year tam'd"
(Marvell //. 73-74). Yeats's bloody tide may thus refer to civil

9. Ben Jonson, Vol. VIII, pp. 235-40.

10. M.R. James, The Ghost Stories, 2nd ed. (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), pp.
490ff.
11. Quoted in Colonel S. Dewe White, "Revival of Jacobitism", The Westminster
Review, Vol. 146, no. 4 (1896), pp. 417-26, (p. 417).
12. Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters, ed. H.M. Margoliouth, 3rd ed., 2 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 91.

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

strife in Ireland, as well as in the world as a whole (we may com

pare " 'There's nothing but our own red blood/ Can make a right
Rose Tree' " on p. 206 (//. 17-18)). Marvell's poem "AnHoratian
Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland", with its suggestion
that Cromwell's rebellion at home is the necessary prerequisite for
his military "success" abroad (//. 73ff.), thus becomes a basis for
an ironic reading by Yeats of Cromwell's achievement. The success
ful rebel of Marvell's poem who tames Ireland and the world,
becomes the Antichrist who causes conflict, oppression, and a
transvaluation of civilized values. Cromwell has set out to "ruine
the great Work of Time" (Marvell /. 34), just as the Beast in
Yeats's poem has "vexed to nightmare" "twenty centuries" (Mar
vell 1. 44) for whom "the antient Rights" must "make room"
(//. 38, 43). Marvell is not being Yeatsian here of course; but such
imagery may well suggest to us the new order of "the widening
gyre" (Yeats /. 1), where "the centre cannot hold" (/. 3), just as in
Marvell's poem, Church and State have been destroyed ("Then
burning through the Air he went,/ And Pallaces and Temples rent"
(Marvell //. 21-22)). Cromwell signifies the rise of a new order
which annuls "the antient Rights", and destroys their buildings
and institutions. In Yeats's poem, the Beast comes, among other
things, to destroy the Christian dispensation (/. 11 ff.).
The crux of Marvell's poem, however, occurs at the point where
he uses the images of the "Falcon" and the "Falckner" (Marvel
//. 91, 96). If the state can "lure" the falcon Cromwell into "the
Republick's hand", all will be well: otherwise his tendency towards
destruction will rampage unchecked. A Cromwell "grown stiffer
with Command" will be a dangerous man (Marvell //. 81, 82, 95).
Yeats wrote in one of his drafts that "the great falcon must
come", but his final image is a more cunning one than the directly
apocalyptic.13 By placing the falcon and falconer at the beginning
of the poem, he begins where Marvell left off. We see the falconer
has definitely lost control, and that as a result "The blood-dimmed
tide is loosed" (Yeats /. 5); as in Marvell's poem control of Crom
well depends on his being satisfied with "having kill'd", and not
wishing to continue to urge "his active star" "through adventrous
War" (Marvell //. 11-12, 93). In Yeats's poem, the urge to power
and destruction underlying Marvell's description of Cromwell has
burst out into the open in the modern world. "The worst/ Are full
of passionate intensity" (Yeats //. 7-8), just as "the armed Bands/
Did clap their bloody hands" (Marvell //. 55-56). These may be
the equivalent of the "mobs" that "fawn upon the murderer"
"Of innocence" in the drafts of Yeats's poem.14
13. Stallworthy, p. 20.
14. Ibid., p. 19.
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 FALCON AND FALCONER

Marvell's poem calls on Cromwell to "... for the last effect/

Still keep thy Sword erect" (Marvell //. 115-116). But this image
of the cross that has the "force ... to fright/ The Spirits of the
shady Night" (Marvell //. 117-118), is undercut by the way the
sword has to be held for use in "force": that is, by the hilt, making
an inverted cross. Thus Cromwell's "Arts that did gain/ A Pow'r",
may well be those of black magic, even in Marvell's poem (//.
119-120). Certainly the ambivalence of these last lines suggests
that Cromwell's violence may only apparently support Christian
order, and the violence in Yeats's poem is directly identified as
anti-Christian. Cromwell's inverted cross of a sword has become
that of "Mere anarchy" (Yeats /. 4), which is what Cromwell's
actions have been ? those of rebellion and bloodshed. Just as
Cromwell changes Britain (and Ireland too) "Into another Mold"
(Marvell /. 36), so Yeats's Antichrist changes the shape of "the
Second Coming" from Christ's to that of the "rough beast" (Yeats
//. 10, 21). Apocalypse and bloodshed mark both poems. "The
Second Coming" does, of course, have other antecedents besides
these subtle, specific comments on mid-seventeenth century
politics. But given the way in which the image of the falconer and
the falcon is turned by Yeats towards a specifically negative reading
of Marvell's coded ambivalence towards power and violation, we
ought to suspect a relationship between the two writers. Consider
ing Yeats's sympathy for Jonsonian ethics, his love for the aris
tocracy, hatred for Cromwell, and respect for the ideals of custom
and courtesy, is it surprising that he should choose as one of his
models for a poem considering the violation of "The ceremony of
innocence" (Yeats /. 6), Marvell's discussion of Cromwell and the
death of King Charles?

He nothing common did or mean

Upon that memorable Scene . . .
(Marvell //. 57-58)

Yeats had a great deal of time for those who were neither common
nor mean:

You ask me what I have found, and far and wide I go:
Nothing but Cromwell's house and Cromwell's murderous
crew,
The lovers and the dancers are beaten into the clay,
And the tall men and the swordsmen and the horsemen,
where are they?
("The Curse of Cromwell" //. 1-4)
"Cavalier" is from the late Latin "caballarius": a horseman.

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 IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

IASAIL

Thanks to our regular contributors for their help in producing

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 Members of the Sub-Committee
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