Poetry: The Second Coming

Overview
William Butler Yeats’s 1919 poem "The Second Coming" envisions a world slipping beyond control and anticipates the birth of a terrifying new epoch. Its two-part movement traces a path from social and spiritual disintegration to a prophetic vision of a monstrous figure that overturns Christian expectations of renewal. The poem’s compressed, incantatory language fuses private symbolism with public crisis, creating a stark portrait of a civilization whose foundations no longer hold.

Dissolution of Order
The opening conjures spiraling disorder through the image of a falcon that can no longer hear the falconer, a severed bond between guide and guided. The world moves in a "widening gyre", a vortex of expansion that breaks concentrations of authority and meaning. Out of this motion comes the famous verdict: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold", followed by a picture of spreading violence as a "blood-dimmed tide" drowns innocence. Moral polarity inverts: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity". The first stanza thus sets a scene where institutions, virtues, and hierarchies that once stabilized life have lost their binding force, leaving only centrifugal force and panic.

Revelation and the Rough Beast
In the second stanza, the speaker reaches for a theological framework, expecting that "Surely some revelation is at hand". Instead of Christian redemption, a vision surfaces from "Spiritus Mundi", a communal reservoir of archetypal images. What appears is a sphinx-like creature, "a shape with lion body and the head of a man", whose "gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" suggests inhuman clarity without compassion. Desert birds reel in its shadow, a circle of omen and dread. The vision flickers out, yet its implication persists: the world, "vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle", has been unsettled by the legacy of two millennia of Christian history. That long "stony sleep" ends as the creature’s "hour come round at last" and it "slouches towards Bethlehem to be born", a perverse nativity that negates the promise of the first.

Symbols and Structure
The poem’s two stanzas pivot from diagnosis to apparition. The gyre embodies Yeats’s cyclical theory of history, suggesting that eras expand, exhaust themselves, and give birth to their opposites. The falcon/falconer dramatizes the loss of command and obedience, while the "centre" signifies both political cohesion and metaphysical focus. The "blood-dimmed tide" merges war, revolution, and moral contagion into a single flood. Most provocatively, the title’s "Second Coming" is reversed: rather than Christ returning to renew creation, a rough beast arises to inaugurate a darker dispensation. Bethlehem’s echo deepens the irony, recasting the cradle not as comfort but as the fulcrum of a nightmare.

Historical Resonance
Composed in the aftermath of World War I, amid revolution, pandemic, and Irish upheaval, the poem channels immediate turbulence into a myth of epochal turnover. Its power lies in refusing to name a single cause or ideology; instead it captures the feeling of a world unmoored, in which fervor outstrips wisdom and new forces gather beyond inherited frames. The final question does not resolve the vision but fixes the reader in a charged pause, as if history itself were holding its breath before the birth of something at once inevitable and terrifying.