I make my living as a teacher of 12th Grade English Language Arts at a special needs high school in Westchester County. My students struggle with formidable difficulties, but they are good kids nonetheless, and a good number of them (I won't know exactly how many until they file into their commencement exercise) will have graduated high school by now.
Not surprisingly, I want to offer them a little perspective about the nature of both struggle and hope as they go out into the world. I
would like to explain why I choose "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats, as my text.
Most weekends and many holidays, I recharge my battery, and refresh my soul, by working at the Tenement Museum of the Lower East Side of New York. My magnificent colleagues at the museum are madly in love with history in general, and the history of immigration in New York City in particular.
They are also, for the most part, younger than me, and in many cases, not much older than the kids I teach during the week. So great is their enthusiasm for history that the conversation in the break room on any given afternoon is one answer to a high school teacher's prayers.
The history of Ireland, and the history of the Irish in America, is integral to the context of "Irish Outsiders," the museum's tour that relates, among other things, the travails of the Moore family, who lived a brief and tragic interlude at 97 Orchard Street in the late 1860s.
My young colleagues give me much more credit than I deserve for erudition, and they know that my last name is McCarthy. I am grateful,
humbled, and somewhat agitated to say that they often consult with me - sometimes in friendly, earnest packs - about elements of Irish history. Recently, one of my friends at the museum asked me to name the single most important person in the history of Ireland. I prefaced my answer by reminding him, gently enough so that I would feel I had been humble, but not so emphatically to keep him, or anyone else from continuing to ask such questions, that I was not a scholar of Irish history.
I also told him that if he insisted on an answer, and if he had to have an answer then and there, I would say William Butler Yeats.
No one answer to that question would satisfy everyone, but I tried to make my case. Yeats is the first Irish Nobel laureate - poet, dramatist, scholar, patriot, and statesman. He was born in the year the American Civil War ended, and he died in the year the Nazis invaded Poland. So he lived a relatively long and extraordinarily productive life at a time when Ireland and the world were swept up in tides exhilarating and ominous; terrible beauty indeed.
It can be argued that no writer in the history of the English language made a more graceful synthesis of the romantic and the real, the mythical and the modern. Yeats spoke to Ireland, and of and for Ireland, to the world. He speaks to us still, on our way to becoming, for better or worse, whatever we will become.
"The Second Coming" was published in 1920. The Triple Alliance had won the Great War, and they were busy losing the peace. Ireland was about to become a free state, and that state was about to be torn into warring camps. "The Second Coming" is not a cheerful read, and inasmuch as most commencement speakers like to keep things upbeat, its imagery and portent might not be attractive to them.
At this point in my career as an educator, I 'm sorry that this is so: reading it in the context of what the Class of 2012 can expect as they get on with their lives, it sounds like fair warning and good counsel. It would certainly resonate with the teachers in the audience as well:
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer."
I don't think Yeats was thinking of adolescents and their teachers when he penned these first two lines of "The Second Coming," but these words speak volumes to us. Every teacher knows the unsettling feeling that his students are getting away from him, but every good teacher has to remember that they are supposed to get away from him: they are supposed to grow, in wisdom and autonomy, to the point where the least of what they need is new teachers.
Ready or not, come the summer of senior year, the falcon flies off, free of constraints and commands he has long outgrown. You would hope that blue skies and promising trajectories await - but alas.....
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."
Adolescents will rebel - must rebel. Nevertheless, like the younger children they used to be, they want structure, and for the sake of the adults they are trying to become, they long for a world that makes sense. The graduates of 2012 have already begun to sense what Yeats spelled out for the graduates of 1920: the future of the society that was supposed to be humanity's bulwark against insecurity is itself insecure. This is just the beginning of your difficulties if you graduate Summa Cum Laud from the Ivy League. If you are leaving institutional dysfunction for random dysfunction, how do you even begin to make sense of the fact that....
"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned."
Who could blame a graduate for believing, as he transitions from the black and white world of childhood to the vast and relentless gray areas of adulthood, that they are always required to pay first for society's progress, and they will always pay most dearly for society's mistakes? Who can blame the Class of 2012 for believing....
"The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."
On my darker days at my regular place of business, I want to chisel these words above the main entrance. Who could deny to adolescents that too often, in the murky world of adults, none speak more regularly and more insistently than the ignorant? And do our young people begin to intuit, with the glut of information and the constant shifting of perspective, that anxiety and perplexity are the wage of the open mind?
"Surely some revelation is at hand;/Surely the Second Coming is at hand."
If the Second Coming occurs in my life time, and it plays out as it does in last book of the Bible, it won't be the first time in my life that I was blindsided by nothing but my own denial. Much is made about the appalling notion that the most revolutionary element of the American Dream, that children are destined for different but better lives than the lives of their parents, is in serious doubt.
Today's college graduate, already overwhelmed by debt, and now chronically under-employed, suspects that she has come to the edge of the limitless opportunity that brought her immigrant antecedents to these shores. Surely the revelation that this is a land of rapidly diminishing opportunity is not what we want to impart to our graduates, but graduation is the best possible time for them to remember that it was the search for new and self-defining opportunity that turned their ancestors into immigrants - and that those immigrants, to an immigrant, were pioneers. It is also well to remember that not all of our pioneers went looking for new worlds. Many sought to re-arrange, redefine, or recast the old worlds - and for this we did not thank them right away....
"And what rough beast, his hour come round at last,/slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
I used to assume that the rough beast to which Yeats referred was retribution. Now I hope that the rough beast is a pioneer - an army of young pioneers, bedraggled by a difficult journey, but still intent on a new order of affairs.
Whether the rough beast brings comeuppance, or revolution, I note that he is slouching towards Bethlehem, the little town that became the portal of Salvation. Bethlehem is the birthplace of Redemption. If any little town can hold its own against the rough beast, whether he wishes
it well or ill, Bethlehem is the one.
Graduating classes everywhere, you are in my heart, and in my prayers, because what was once said about Bethlehem, and what could truly be said about "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats, is true of you as well: "the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight."
