Analysis of William Butler Yeats’s Poem, “The Second Coming”

“The Second Coming”

By William Butler Yeats (1919)

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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 written in blank verse with a consistent meter but no particular rhyme scheme

The poem is divided into two stanzas

Yeats wrote the poem in 1919, shortly after the First World War and on the cusp of the “Roaring
Twenties” in the United States, in which modern civilization was taking hold with the
widespread use of the automobile, the telephone, the development of motion pictures, and other
household electronic appliances

This was the Jazz Age; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, captures some of the
essence of individuals and their world at the height in the 1920s

The imagery in the opening of Yeats’s poem describes the direction things are going, spiraling
out of control
The picture that Yeats paints in his poem is menacing and disturbing, particularly since anarchy
seems to encompass everyone, everywhere

“The Second Coming” could refer to Jesus Christ returning to reign on earth

Perhaps Yeats is also predicting a Second World War or upheaval of sorts since the world to him
seems to be in such a mess

While it could be a sign that another revolution is coming, it seems to be more than that

Something sinister, an awakening of something ancient

Many interpret the line “A shape with lion body and the head of a man” as the sphinx

Some have contested that Yeats is actually talking about the symbol of the sphinx that inspired
the Egyptians to build the monument in the desert

Now that symbol is inspiring him in this poem

The further description that he gives of it seems to be slowly moving around, thus adding to its
immensity

The premonition he has suggests a troubled future for the world

Something has been born beyond human capacity and reason, nightmarish

Yeats describes a “beast” slouching towards Bethlehem to be born, which seems more
threatening and menacing than hopeful and promising

The Nigerian author, Chinua Achebe, used the line “Things fall apart” for the title of his 1958
novel, which describes the effects of European colonization in Africa

The significance of Achebe doing this further indicates that whatever image Yeats saw was
possibly taking shape among the Igbo people

References

“A Short Analysis of Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming.’” Jan. 11, 2016.

www.interestingliterature.com https://interestingliterature.com/2016/01/11/a-short-
analysis-of-yeatss-the-second-coming/

Shmoop Editorial Team. “‘The Second Coming’ Summary.” Shmoop. Shmoop University, Inc.,
11 Nov. 2008. Web. 1 Dec. 2017. https://www.shmoop.com/second-
coming/summary.html

Shmoop Editorial Team. “‘The Second Coming’: Stanza I Summary.” Shmoop. Shmoop
 University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 1 Dec. 2017. https://www.shmoop.com/second-
coming/stanza-1-summary.html

Shmoop Editorial Team. “‘The Second Coming’: Stanza II Summary.” Shmoop. Shmoop
University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 1 Dec. 2017. https://www.shmoop.com/second-
coming/stanza-2-summary.html

Shmoop Editorial Team. “Things Fall Apart What’s Up with the Epigraph?” Shmoop. Shmoop
University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 1 Dec. 2017. https://www.shmoop.com/things-fall-
apart/epigraph.html

Yeats, William Butler. (1919, 1994). The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Wordsworth Poetry
Library.

Yeats, William Butler. (1919). “The Second Coming.” http://www.potw.org/.

http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html

Yeats, William Butler. (1919). “The Second Coming.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/. 1

Dec. 2017. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming