¶ … Second Coming

Things Fall Apart and "The Second Coming": Reflection Paper

W. B Yeats, the author of "The Second Coming," the poem whose phrase "Things fall apart" became the title of Chinua Achebe's novel, was an Irish poet writing in the wake of English colonial rule. Similarly Achebe was a Nigerian novelist writing about the British colonial tyranny over Africa. Achebe also used the symbolism of Yeats' poem to construct his novel. In Achebe's novel, the military hero Okonkwo acts as the falconer who hopes to see his son Nwoye rule over his tribe in the image of his father. Yet Nwoye becomes, though his alliance with Christian missionaries, entirely deaf to the values held dear to his father, thus "the falcon cannot hear the falconer," just as Okonkwo grew estranged from his own father.

The blood-dimmed tide of Yeats' poem becomes the tide of clansmen who kill Okonkwo's adopted son, because of his the word of the oracle, even though they received him peaceably in an exchange. Thus, the "ceremony of innocence" by which the boy was received into the tribe is now replaced with violence. Okonkwo, even though he loves the boy, kills him to avoid seeming weak.

Yeats' slow-moving rough beast with a lion's body but the head of a man may seem to represent Okonkwo, at first, in Achebe's novel, given Okonkwo's violence towards other people in the novel. But while Okonkwo is certainly rough, and unable to appreciate feminine and humane values, as embodied, for example, in his wife's tribe or in the missionaries his son turns to for guidance, the coming colonial influence to Africa could also be characterized as a beast. The beast moves slowly, and is at first imperceptible to the tribesmen who are concerned with their own internal disputes, but gradually the political and religious worldview of outsiders subsume the home-grown tribal ideology of the past.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Heinemann, 1996.