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'The Second Coming'

First printed in The Dial in November 1920 and included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael
Robartes and the Dancer

When William Butler Yeats wrote the poem 'The Second Coming' in 1919, the first world war had just
ended. World War I, dubbed "The War to End All Wars," was the most horrific conflict the world had
ever seen on such a global scale, and another war was brewing as Yeats wrote the poem.

At this same time, Yeats' young wife Georgie Hyde-Lees was pregnant with their daughter and came
down with the Spanish Influenza. As a result of this, the birth was difficult, and Yeats was worried they
wouldn't make it. William Butler Yeats' poetry had always been concerned with the grandiose and the
Occult, and the poem 'The Second Coming' is no exception.

Yeats and Hyde-Lees often participated in a ritual writing practice called automatic writing, meaning
Yeats and Hyde-Lees believed spirits passed over to the human world and used their bodies as
conduits for art. Yeats also believed that history moved in 2,000-year cycles. As the Year of Christ was
coming to an end at this time, he believed another historic cycle was set to repeat itself, thus leading
the creation of 'The Second Coming' in all of its apocalyptic glory.

Summary

 Stanza One: The first stanza of 'The Second Coming' paints a very bleak image. The poem
opens with the image of a falcon getting lost in a gyre (or vortex, like a hurricane). For Yeats in
'The Second Coming', the gyre has additional context, representing patterns across years. Yeats
indicates in stanza two that the gyre refers to a 2,000-year cycle that had just ended, a new one
beginning with WWI. The falcon is lost in the gyre and cannot hear the falconer, representative
of humanity's lack of control over the events of WWI. Anarchy is everywhere in this apocalyptic
image, and there is a bloody tide sweeping over the earth. All the good people don't have the
conviction they need, and the bad people are filled with "passionate intensity" (line 8)

 Stanza Two: Stanza two begins with the speaker positing that surely the Second Coming (of
Christ) must be upon them when, mere seconds after they make their assertion, they are
plagued by a vision of a sphinx-like creature in the desert. This beast described clearly
unsettles the speaker. The creature is described as, "a shape ... with a blank gaze as pitiless as
the sun ... is moving ... while all about it / reel shadows" (lines 14-17). What a disturbing image!
Then the speaker's vision of the creature depicts a darkness falling. A cycle of 2,000 years has
completed, and humanity has been "vexed to nightmare" by the coming of the new sphinx-like
creature. There are many moving parts in the final lines of stanza two:

o Lines 10-13: The speaker begins to have a vision of dark images as a result of the
anarchy revelation-like events of the time. They hardly get out the words "Surely the
second coming is at hand" before this vision overtakes them.
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o Lines 13-16: The speaker begins to see the human-like image of the creature moving its
thighs and slinking closer to Europe. This image of the creature is pieced together using
different descriptions of body parts (lion body, head of a man, blank gaze, moving its
thighs)
o Lines 16-17: There are shadows of desert birds moving all around the creature,
indicating that it is not alone in its dark desires for Europe.
o Lines 17-22: Here we really get the image of the 2,000-year cycle being vexed to
nightmare by the coming of the creature. As the creature slouches toward Bethlehem
(representing Europe) the poem recalls a rocking cradle (as the one the Christ-child was
placed in), representing the beginning of a new 2,000-year cycle with this violent
creature coming to devour Europe, as opposed to the peace, love, and forgiveness that
the Christ-child brought at the beginning of the last 2,000-year cycle.

Detailed summary

"The Second Coming" is narrated by a speaker who is observing the world around him with horror.
The poem begins with the phrase "Turning and turning in the widening gyre," a sentence that evokes
an occult symbol that perpetually fascinated William Butler Yeats: interlocked circles. A gyre is a
spiral or vortex, and Yeats believed that the universe was comprised of interlocked circles, which
together make up up individual lives that coalesce to form the whole of existence.
Essentially, this first line is just a complex way of saying that something is happening in this world.
Something is churning and awakening; some new existence is rising out of the current haze of life that
we all live in, expanding it and enlarging the scope of what life is and altering how the world works on
a fundamental level.

The whole first section finds the speaker observing a world that is losing touch with order and
morality. Violence is destroying innocence, people have become detached from their leaders,
something fundamental is dissolving, and people who believe in goodness are being silenced, while
the loudest speakers are the villains and chaos-bringers.

The second section, beginning with the line "Surely some revelation is at hand," finds the speaker
sure that some major shift is happening around him. All this chaos cannot be an accident, certainly.
Something vast is coming, some distorted version of the Christian apocalypse is descending upon the
land; some ending is approaching.

The third section describes the speaker's vision for what this Second Coming, this new world
redefined by all the violence and chaos that occurred in the past, might look like. He thinks about the
"Spiritus Mundi," which is a Latin term meaning "World Spirit," and begins to visualize images within
this "World Spirit," including desert sphinxes and shadowy birds.

By the end of the poem, the speaker is sure that something even worse is coming. Some nightmare—
some "rough beast"—is rising, approaching the earth at a rapid pace. He doesn't know what this
creature is, but he can sense its approach—and it is the ominous core of "The Second Coming," that
mysterious tide of evil and mystery approaching the world in the form of a modernity full of violence,
war, and the loss of traditional meaning and values.
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'The Second Coming' contains an abundance of Christian allusions. A few allusions (though not an
exhaustive list) to Revelations are indicated below:

 The Rocking Cradle: As indicated above, the rocking cradle represents the birth of the Christ-
child in Bethlehem 2,000 years previous, and creates a distinct juxtaposition between the
terrifying desert creature and the violence it brings and the birth of the Prince of Peace (Jesus
Christ)
 The title 'The Second Coming': The title itself is an allusion to the event of the Second Coming
of Christ as mentioned in the Book of Revelation. Yeats points out through naming the poem
'The Second Coming' as well as lines 9-12 that the aftermath of WWI was so horrific that
another 2,000-year cycle must have begun with the coming of the sphinx creature. This
indication that WWI was so awful that the Second Coming must be at hand was likely
hyperbole on Yeats' part, as Yeats was heavily invested in mysticism, never outwardly
resolving his beliefs towards Christianity in his lifetime. In 'The Second Coming', while
humanity is expecting something wonderful as the Second Coming of Christ, at the end of the
2,000-year cycle humanity is greeted by something far more monstrous, with no salvation in
sight.
 The Bloody Tide: Water running red with blood or turning to blood occurs several times
within the Bible, as seen in the story of Moses and Revelations. In Revelations, there is a vision
that the water will run red with blood at the Second Coming of Christ as humanity descends
into Chaos.

Despite Yeats himself renouncing organised religions such as Christianity, his use of Christian imagery
meant his audiences in English-speaking Europe would be well aware of the Christian language used.

The Second Coming' uses several symbols to indicate the end of the known world, including the gyre,
the tide, and the creature.

Phrases and lines from the poem are used in many works

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s political manifesto The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, a defense of
political centrism opens with citing the Yeats poem.

Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart (1958)

Joan Didion's essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)

Walker Percy’s novel The Second Coming (1980)

Peter De Vries' novel Slouching Towards Kalamazoo (1983)

Robert B. Parker's novel The Widening Gyre (1983)

The 1996 non-fiction book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American
Decline by Robert Bork

Elyn Saks' memoir The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (2007)

Jonathan Alter's political biography of Barack Obama, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies
also cites Yeats' poem