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Is the “Second Coming” by WB Yeats about the Ripper Murders?
The English Catholic poet Francis Thompson is suspect for the Jack the Ripper Murders. Amongst other things, this assertion is based on the fact that he had the ability, motive, opportunity and weapon needed to kill a cluster of five women in London’s Whitechapel in 1888. On November 9 1885 Thompson argued with his father Charles Thompson about his on his plans to remarry a woman named Ann Richardson, after the death of his mother Mary. He fled his family home in Manchester. After reaching London, with a dissecting scalpel most likely gained from having had just worked at a medical instrument factory, Thompson had become a homeless drug addict and had read volumes on the occult. In particular, on black masses and necromancy, this is the magical doctrine of the raising of the dead. He then fell in love with a prostitute. One day he found that some poems that he had sent into a magazine had been published and that he was going to become famous. It had taken more than a year to gain a response to his submission. He went to his prostitute lover and told her of his impending fame. That is great she said, but she also added that she could never see him again. When he asked why, she told him that nobody was going to accept the relationship- him being a Catholic poet and her a prostitute. That was the last time that she was seen alive. He grew shocked and acted impulsively in growing delirium. When he regained his senses, he understood that he had lost her. He was full of sorrow and bewilderment but he was not without certain kinds of knowledge. Thompson decided to bring her back to life, but there was only one way that she could not leave him again. He would bring her back in such a way that her spirit would encompass the earth. He would kill in the cultural and political centre of the Earth by following ancient occult rites, so that when she came back, her spirit would spread outwards on the waves of energies until she would be like a spirit, existing everywhere. His plan was that by killing these five women on special days, particular places, and ways he would engineer a sort of resurrection. After the last killing, he did believe that she had returned but she was not herself. Instead, he had spawned a demonic creation made from the five victims. Thompson’s letters and prose and poems lend credence to him believing this idea. The poet WB Yeat’s, may have also concluded that Thompson and the Ripper were one in the same. Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming” is a shortened version of a much longer earlier poem by Thompson. Both poems may explain the Ripper’s motives for the crime and its perceived horrific outcome.
Katherine Tynan, the poet, was a close friend, of Alice Meynell the wife of Wilfrid Meynell, Ripper suspect Francis Thompson’s publisher. In 1888, Tynan was living with the Meynell family, at their house in Palace Court, London. Tynan told of Francis Thompson, ‘He has done more to harm the English language than the worst American papers.’ Of his writings, Tynan told of, 'words that if you pricked them, would bleed'. Tynan published Thompson's essay “Shelley”, in the Dublin in 1912. William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet, dramatist and prose writer, was a close friend of Tynan from 1886. While Tynan lived at the Meynell's home Yeats often spent evenings there and sent continuous correspondence addressed to Katherine Tynan as living at their address. Yeats’ first met Francis Thompson at a meeting for the 'Rhymers Club', an exclusive group of fellow poets. Thompson’s poetry may have directly influenced Yeats’ most known poem. Both Thompson's 1891 poem “Sister Songs” and William Butler Yeats’ 1920 poem “Second Coming” describe the circumstances of the birth of a deity. They both feature a dessert, a falcon, a religious site, a drowning, a vacant eyed lion-creature, an infant, a cradle, tidal forces, and the passage of 2000 years. Wilfrid Meynell was a friend with both Thompson and Yeats and he tried early on to have them meet each other. Thompson, who wrote to Meynell, stalled the first occasion for such a meeting,
‘Dear Wilfrid I could not come in to tea with Blunt and Yeats, for I had to go down to the Academy, and I was back much too late. Had I known on Thursday I would have altered my arrangements so as to accept your invitation. I am sorry to have missed this chance of meeting Yeats as I have long desired to do. You know I heartily admire his work.'
Thompson and Yeats, both shared an interest in Mystic poetry, they first met at the 'Rhymer's Club'. This was a poetry appreciation society who gathered in small hired rooms above the 'Ye Olde Chesire Cheese' in the Strand. The gathering each read aloud their own poetry and then discussed how each could improve their works. Francis Thompson was reticent, not volunteering to read his poems aloud. Years later Yeats wrote to Wilfrid Meynell of Thompson,
'Now I regret that I never met him, except once for a few minutes. An extreme idealism of the imagination seems to be incompatible in almost all with a perfectly harmonious relation to the mechanics of life.'
Here is a side-by-side comparison of Yeat’s and Thompson’s poems.
THOMPSON’S SISTER SONGS,
‘Wheeled a flight of Dryads
Murmuring in measured melody.
Gyre in gyre their treading was;...
Wheeling with an adverse flight,
In twi-circle o'er the grass,
These to the left, and those to the right;
All the band linked by each other's hand;...
There was the clash of their cymbals clanging...
Whereat they broke to the left and to the right,...
Yet still my falcon spirit makes her point
Over the covert where
Thou, sweetest quarry, hast put in from her!...
The stranded moon lay quivering like a lustrous
Medusa newly washed up from the tide...
But where day's glance turns baffled from the deeps,
Die out those lovely swarms;
And in the immense profound no creature glides or creeps
And through my hazes
of pain and fear thine yes, young wonder shone
Then, as flies scatter from carrion,
Or rooks in spreading gyres like broken smoke
Wheel, when some sound their quietude has broke,
Fled, at thy countenance, all that doubting spawn,
The heart which I questioned spoke
A cry impetuous from its depths was drawn,-
'I take the omen of this face of dawn;...
As an Arab journeyth
Through the sand of Ayaman,
Lean Thirst, lolling its cracked tongue,
Lagging by his side along;
And a rusty-winged Death
Grating its low flight before,
Casting ribbed shadows o'er
The blank desert, blank and tan,
He lifts by hap toward where the morning's roots are
His weary stare,-
Sees although they plashless[dry] mutes are... [
A sight like innocence when one has sinned!…
While with unblinking glare
The tawny-hided desert crouches watching her
Such a watered dream has tarried
Trembling on my desert arid;
Even so
Its lovely gleemings
Seemings show
Of things not seemings;...
As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
Moves all the labouring surges of the world….
And murmurous still of its nativity...
Eve no gentlier lays her cooling cheek
On the burning brow of the sick earth
Sick with death, and sick with birth,
Aeon to aeon, in secular fever twirled,...
As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine
Moves all the labouring surges of the world...
And Awe was reigned in awe,
At one small house of Nazareth;
And Golgotha...
Force were not force, would spill itself in vain;
We know the Titan by his champed [bitten] chain,
Stay is heat's cradle, it is rocked therein...
And though he cherisheth.
The babe most strangely born from out her death,
Some tender trick of her hath maybe;-
It is not she!...
And stone faces kindle in the glow
And into the blank eyes the irids grow
Go Sister-songs, to that sweet-pair
For whom I have your frail limbs fashioned,
And framed featously,-‘
YEAT’S ‘SECOND COMING’,
‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely some Second Coming is at hand,
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitless as the sun,
Is moving is slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last.
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Richard Patterson. 2014. A Paradox Text.
The English Catholic poet Francis Thompson is suspect for the Jack the Ripper Murders. Amongst other things, this assertion is based on the fact that he had the ability, motive, opportunity and weapon needed to kill a cluster of five women in London’s Whitechapel in 1888. On November 9 1885 Thompson argued with his father Charles Thompson about his on his plans to remarry a woman named Ann Richardson, after the death of his mother Mary. He fled his family home in Manchester. After reaching London, with a dissecting scalpel most likely gained from having had just worked at a medical instrument factory, Thompson had become a homeless drug addict and had read volumes on the occult. In particular, on black masses and necromancy, this is the magical doctrine of the raising of the dead. He then fell in love with a prostitute. One day he found that some poems that he had sent into a magazine had been published and that he was going to become famous. It had taken more than a year to gain a response to his submission. He went to his prostitute lover and told her of his impending fame. That is great she said, but she also added that she could never see him again. When he asked why, she told him that nobody was going to accept the relationship- him being a Catholic poet and her a prostitute. That was the last time that she was seen alive. He grew shocked and acted impulsively in growing delirium. When he regained his senses, he understood that he had lost her. He was full of sorrow and bewilderment but he was not without certain kinds of knowledge. Thompson decided to bring her back to life, but there was only one way that she could not leave him again. He would bring her back in such a way that her spirit would encompass the earth. He would kill in the cultural and political centre of the Earth by following ancient occult rites, so that when she came back, her spirit would spread outwards on the waves of energies until she would be like a spirit, existing everywhere. His plan was that by killing these five women on special days, particular places, and ways he would engineer a sort of resurrection. After the last killing, he did believe that she had returned but she was not herself. Instead, he had spawned a demonic creation made from the five victims. Thompson’s letters and prose and poems lend credence to him believing this idea. The poet WB Yeat’s, may have also concluded that Thompson and the Ripper were one in the same. Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming” is a shortened version of a much longer earlier poem by Thompson. Both poems may explain the Ripper’s motives for the crime and its perceived horrific outcome.
Katherine Tynan, the poet, was a close friend, of Alice Meynell the wife of Wilfrid Meynell, Ripper suspect Francis Thompson’s publisher. In 1888, Tynan was living with the Meynell family, at their house in Palace Court, London. Tynan told of Francis Thompson, ‘He has done more to harm the English language than the worst American papers.’ Of his writings, Tynan told of, 'words that if you pricked them, would bleed'. Tynan published Thompson's essay “Shelley”, in the Dublin in 1912. William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet, dramatist and prose writer, was a close friend of Tynan from 1886. While Tynan lived at the Meynell's home Yeats often spent evenings there and sent continuous correspondence addressed to Katherine Tynan as living at their address. Yeats’ first met Francis Thompson at a meeting for the 'Rhymers Club', an exclusive group of fellow poets. Thompson’s poetry may have directly influenced Yeats’ most known poem. Both Thompson's 1891 poem “Sister Songs” and William Butler Yeats’ 1920 poem “Second Coming” describe the circumstances of the birth of a deity. They both feature a dessert, a falcon, a religious site, a drowning, a vacant eyed lion-creature, an infant, a cradle, tidal forces, and the passage of 2000 years. Wilfrid Meynell was a friend with both Thompson and Yeats and he tried early on to have them meet each other. Thompson, who wrote to Meynell, stalled the first occasion for such a meeting,
‘Dear Wilfrid I could not come in to tea with Blunt and Yeats, for I had to go down to the Academy, and I was back much too late. Had I known on Thursday I would have altered my arrangements so as to accept your invitation. I am sorry to have missed this chance of meeting Yeats as I have long desired to do. You know I heartily admire his work.'
Thompson and Yeats, both shared an interest in Mystic poetry, they first met at the 'Rhymer's Club'. This was a poetry appreciation society who gathered in small hired rooms above the 'Ye Olde Chesire Cheese' in the Strand. The gathering each read aloud their own poetry and then discussed how each could improve their works. Francis Thompson was reticent, not volunteering to read his poems aloud. Years later Yeats wrote to Wilfrid Meynell of Thompson,
'Now I regret that I never met him, except once for a few minutes. An extreme idealism of the imagination seems to be incompatible in almost all with a perfectly harmonious relation to the mechanics of life.'
Here is a side-by-side comparison of Yeat’s and Thompson’s poems.
THOMPSON’S SISTER SONGS,
‘Wheeled a flight of Dryads
Murmuring in measured melody.
Gyre in gyre their treading was;...
Wheeling with an adverse flight,
In twi-circle o'er the grass,
These to the left, and those to the right;
All the band linked by each other's hand;...
There was the clash of their cymbals clanging...
Whereat they broke to the left and to the right,...
Yet still my falcon spirit makes her point
Over the covert where
Thou, sweetest quarry, hast put in from her!...
The stranded moon lay quivering like a lustrous
Medusa newly washed up from the tide...
But where day's glance turns baffled from the deeps,
Die out those lovely swarms;
And in the immense profound no creature glides or creeps
And through my hazes
of pain and fear thine yes, young wonder shone
Then, as flies scatter from carrion,
Or rooks in spreading gyres like broken smoke
Wheel, when some sound their quietude has broke,
Fled, at thy countenance, all that doubting spawn,
The heart which I questioned spoke
A cry impetuous from its depths was drawn,-
'I take the omen of this face of dawn;...
As an Arab journeyth
Through the sand of Ayaman,
Lean Thirst, lolling its cracked tongue,
Lagging by his side along;
And a rusty-winged Death
Grating its low flight before,
Casting ribbed shadows o'er
The blank desert, blank and tan,
He lifts by hap toward where the morning's roots are
His weary stare,-
Sees although they plashless[dry] mutes are... [
A sight like innocence when one has sinned!…
While with unblinking glare
The tawny-hided desert crouches watching her
Such a watered dream has tarried
Trembling on my desert arid;
Even so
Its lovely gleemings
Seemings show
Of things not seemings;...
As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine,
Moves all the labouring surges of the world….
And murmurous still of its nativity...
Eve no gentlier lays her cooling cheek
On the burning brow of the sick earth
Sick with death, and sick with birth,
Aeon to aeon, in secular fever twirled,...
As the innocent moon, that nothing does but shine
Moves all the labouring surges of the world...
And Awe was reigned in awe,
At one small house of Nazareth;
And Golgotha...
Force were not force, would spill itself in vain;
We know the Titan by his champed [bitten] chain,
Stay is heat's cradle, it is rocked therein...
And though he cherisheth.
The babe most strangely born from out her death,
Some tender trick of her hath maybe;-
It is not she!...
And stone faces kindle in the glow
And into the blank eyes the irids grow
Go Sister-songs, to that sweet-pair
For whom I have your frail limbs fashioned,
And framed featously,-‘
YEAT’S ‘SECOND COMING’,
‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely some Second Coming is at hand,
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with a lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitless as the sun,
Is moving is slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last.
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Richard Patterson. 2014. A Paradox Text.
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