“The Second Coming” is a poem written by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920 and included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to describe allegorically the atmosphere of post-war Europe. It is considered a canonical work of modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.
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 the 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 sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its 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?
The poem is split into two stanzas with different focuses: the first focuses on the present breakdown of the world order, while the second describes the society and moral order which will emerge from this apocalyptic situation.] This reflects Yeats’ philosophy of the nature of gyres: as one society descends into incoherent chaos, another set of morals reflective of a more violent, heartless epoch will arise.
The first stanza immediately introduces Yeats’ concept of the gyre, introducing the world’s setting as one which is “turning and turning” in the gyre as it widens to the point of apocalypse. The image of a falconer unable to call back their falcon is invoked in reference to this state, demonstrating helplessness and inability for individuals to control or stop the inevitable conclusion of the world’s moral reversal. The narrator then describes a variety of brutal images: the unleashing of anarchy, a “blood-dimmed tide”, the loss of innocence, and a circumstance where the good in society fail to act while the wicked are emboldened; in summary, a circumstance where societal norms and institutions are in the process of collapse. The repetition of the term “loosed” serves to restate the widening, or loosening, of the gyre, calling back to the ultimate cause of these events.
The second stanza, rather than acting as a series of disconnected images as the first does, operates as a single prophetic vision. The narrator exclaims that the Second Coming, an apocalyptic event described in Revelation, must be at hand, before receiving a vision from “Spiritus Mundi,” or the “World Soul”. This image concerns a sphinx in the desert, with a “blank and pitiless” expression. Meanwhile, the “indignant” desert birds circling the sphinx contrast with the falcon present at the beginning of the poem. The narrator then remarks that he is now aware that twenty centuries of sleep were “vexed to nightmare” by a rocking cradle, with the juxtaposition of the nightmare and cradle “insist[ing] that the source of terror was bred in the apparent peace of the culturally hypostatise infancy of Christ.” The poem ends with a rhetorical question associating a “rough beast,” whose birth is imminent, with Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ.
