The Second Coming (1865-1939, Ireland)
Background
• Christians believe in the prophecy of the second coming, which
states that Christ will return to earth. They look forward to this
event, believing it will bring an end to worldly suffering.
• Yeats, as a modern poet, challenged conventional views and
inverted them. In this poem Yeats predicts that the opposite will
happen: instead of a Saviour, a beast will arise to terrorise the earth.
• Yeats believed that the history of civilisations worked as two-
thousand-year-long spirals which he called gyres. These would be
tightly controlled at first, and would then unravel and
fall apart towards the wider end. A new cycle would
then be the opposite of the one before.
1+2) Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
• Metaphor = Yeats compares the losing of control of 20th century
man to a falcon that is so far away from its falconer that it is no
longer under its control.
• Man is no longer “hearing” its human controller (religion), so it does
its own thing, with dire/terrible
consequences.
Man loosing control >
doing its own thing
Religious beliefs
3+4) Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
• The result of the unravelling of civilisation is anarchy and violence
5-8) 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.
• Good people are no longer convinced that they are right so they do
nothing, while bad people strongly believe in their own viewpoints
and act upon them.
• 7) These opposites form a powerful contrast, highlighting the
difference between who should be acting and who IS in fact acting
and with what conviction or attitude they are acting.
9+10) Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
• The resulting death and destruction leads the poet to ask whether
this is not the sign of the end of the age and thus an indication that
the second coming is about to take place.
11-14) 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.
• “Second coming!” = is repeated with an exclamation mark. This
shows the increasing hope people have that they are going to be
saved.
• 'Spiritus Mundi' was a term used by W.B. Yeats to describe the
collective soul of the universe containing the memories of all time.
• Yeats describes a disturbing vision of a merciless creature rising out
of the desert. It has the body of a lion and the head of a man,
suggesting that it has the strength of a powerful animal and the
intellect of a human.
• Vast = conveys the colossal size of the beast
15-17) A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds
• Simile = The look in the beast’s eye is as merciless as the way the
sun beats down ruthlessly on the earth without caring about the
effect it has.
• blank and pitiless = shows that the beast is heartless and unsparing.
• slow thighs = implies threatening and sinister muscular strength.
• Reel = sways in circles
• The desert birds can sense its evil and are
• greatly distressed by it.
18-22) 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 beats, its hour comes round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born
• When the vision is over, he realises that this is what’s coming at the
end of the second coming millennium when Christianity loses its
control over the world: civilisation is going to experience the
nightmarish arrival of a beast who will be born in Bethlehem.
• 19) alliteration: the repeated s-sound emphasises the deepness of
his sleep, suggesting that humans have been completely unaware of
the terror that is about to be unleashed.
• 21+22) Assonance: the ou-sound suggests the immense scale and
might of the creature.
18-22) continue
• Bethlehem = irony. Christ was born as an innocent baby in
Bethlehem. He brought a message of hope, peace and redemption.
• This beast will be born in the same place, but it will only bring pain
and misery.
Tone and mood
• Cynical and disillusioned. There is no hope to be found in the second
coming.
Themes
• Anarchy and lack of control
• Spiritual hopelessness.
