Advanced Higher Poetry Summer preparation NOTE: To change the image on this slide, select the picture and delete it. Then click the Pictures icon in the placeholder to insert your own image.

Westminster Bridge – William Wordsworth

“The poem is about what one great critic of Romantic poetry has called "natural supernaturalism" the idea that, as Wordsworth says in The Prelude, there is an "ennobling interchange" between the mind and the world of Nature because both are really aspects of a single immense reality. God, in short, isn't some absent sky-deity who looks down on the universe from a distance, but a divine force that pervades the entire world, including the world of nature and the world of human consciousness. The speaker of Westminster Bridge assumes the truth of all this. What's new to him -- so new that it comes as a revelation -- is that this same divine force also pervades cities, with their mercantile bustle, their dirt, their noise, and their polluted air.”

Second Coming – Yeats

“The poem, in summary, prophesies that some sort of Second Coming (traditionally, this is the return of Christ to Earth, as was promised in the New Testament) is due, and that the anarchy that has arisen all around the world (partly because of the events of the First World War, though the tumultuous events in Yeats’s home country of Ireland are also behind the poem) is a sign that this Second Coming cannot be far off. In the run-up to the millennium, the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ – traditionally, anyway – many people began to consider the possibility of this ‘Second Coming’ more.)

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. But the gyre is ‘widening’: it is getting further and further away from its centre, its point of origin. In short, it’s losing control, and ‘the centre cannot hold’. “ “Spiritus Mundi’ literally means ‘spirit of the world’ and refers to Yeats’s belief that every mind is linked to a single vast intelligence”

Make notes and prepare to discuss on return in August about the LINKS/COMMON THEMES between ‘Westminster Bridge’ and ‘Second Coming’ in terms of spirituality/the human experience