Poem Summary Lines 1 to 4 The first line of The Second Coming presents the metaphor of a spinning gyre.

Gyres, generally, are circular or spiral forms like vortexes or tornadoes. Gyres arespindles or bobbins made of two cones that meet internally. The smallest point of eachcone enters the broad base of the other, so that when the end of the thread is tugged, itwill alternately unwrap from each direction. Everyday gyres are tools used to allowthe consistent feeding of thread into a sewing apparatus.But Yeatss gyre is vast enough to contain a falcon and a falconer it is a gyre withthe dimensions of the world. What is more, its cycle is widening so greatly that thefalconer, who has trained his bird to return, is now unable to summon the bird, whichcannot hear the cry to return home. Again, the falcon and falconer are metaphors for encroaching distance and disorder and so far The Second Coming is anevasive and abstract poem. Then, the poem announces, baldly, what is happening:Things fall apart. The fact that centers of order, control, and sense (which operatelike the falconers cry to the falcon), no longer function, but lose hold, signals anominous message of doom. That the disintegration of things at a vast scale should beaccompanied by a release of anarchy is, then, unsurprising. What is unexpected is thatanarchy is identified as mere. Is the anarchy no real threat? Is there something far worse than anarchy whose presence dwarfs social chaos? While these questions areunresolved, the qualification of anarchy as mere dampens the doom of the poem,breaking up its message into something more complex than, say, familiar urgentannouncements, printed on placards, that warn The end is near.Lines 5 to 8In these lines, the poem delivers three amplifications of what it means for things tofall apart. A tide red with blood is released and loosed over everything, suggestingmassive violent deaths, as in a war. Not merely water, this tide drowns bodies as wellas innocence itself it washes away purity. In its wake, wise, good people arereduced to self-doubt and uncertainty, while the worst of people become passionateand, presumably, powerful. Lines 9 to 13 The poems narrator now makes some guesses about what, exactly, is happening. Hefirst surmises that some revelation is here. A revelation is defined as somethingrevealed, but it is a word packed with suggestiveness, because mystical visions of thedivine plan for humanity, as seen and reported by people, have traditionally beencalled revelations. In particular, the Christian Gods plan for the end of the world as reported by St. John of Patmos is featured in the last book of the Bible, titledRevelation. When the narrator then supposes that the Second Coming is here, heseems to indicate even more strongly that he witnesses an end of the world like theone described in the book of Revelation. (That scenario tells of the return of Christ tothe world, his judgement of all worldly beings, and his foundation of another order, inwhich the just are saved and brought to join God, while the unjust are horrificallydestroyed.) But the narrator is then prompted into a vision of his own. His sigh becomes troubled by an Aimage out of Spiritus Mundi a Latin term thatmeans the spirit of the world.Yeats and many of his contemporaries wondered about the existence of aconsciousness that was not exactly a god, but that was a repository and source for themyths and imaginations of everyone in the world. Like a storehouse of symbols, Spiritus Mundi was seen as a parallel, dreamworld accessible to everyone alive. Itwas not considered to be a realm for Christians only, so the fact that the narratorsvision is a projection from Spiritus Mundi means that its audience will be broader than that of the book of Revelation, and that the vision will be more widely relevantand more universally, mystically binding even than a vision of the second coming of Christ. By announcing his role as visionary, the narrator places himself in the traditionof storytellers who reveal superhuman understandings of fate .Lines 14 to 17 In the narrators vision, an Egyptian sphinx (a mythic creature that is half man, half lion) stirs in the middle of a desert, while its motion startles nearby birds into angryflight. The personality of this creature is sinister it is without pity, and its stare isblank. Certainly, this vision evokes the enormous, ancient statue of a sphinx at Gila,near Cairo, Egypt. The presence of a sphinx suggests that the narrators etherealvision comes from a concrete place even more ancient than Christianity, and moreenormous than the Western world. Lines 18 to 22 Although the narrator has described a frightening and menacing creature, it is not untilthe end of the vision that darkness returns. But from the visions insight, he haslearned something: a rocking cradle (signifying Christ) has caused two thousand yearsof sleep, which is now at the point of night-mare. At this eras end, everything willchange, awakening a rough beast who, apparently due at precisely this moment, isabout to be born in Bethlehem. Since this town was also the birthplace of Christ, weare again reminded of the Second Coming of Christ prophesied in the Bibles book of Revelation. But as the poetic vision was of a sun beast the sphinx we, alongwith the narrator, remain unsure what kind of creature is arriving. What is clear is thatsomething is coming, that it is demanded by the times, that its arrival will changeeverything, and that it will appear amid disorder and destruction. About to be born isan incarnation of ruin. Themes ApocalypseAlthough the term apocalypse is often used to mean disaster, its Greek root signifiesrevelation. The last book of the Christian Bible, sometimes called the Apocalypse, or Revelation, is so named because it reveals St. John of Patmoss vision of the

end of the world as we know it. That his vision is of enormous upheaval of a worldshaken by storm and attacked by locusts before the righteous are saved and the sinnersdestroyed is part of the reason the word apocalypse has come to be synonymouswith catastrophe. But in that book, the ultimate spirit of Judgement Day is as hopeful

as it is furious: it is a vision of final holy justice. Believers in the fate it details couldconsole themselves with the Tate of an eventual day of reckoning. Whatever injusticestook place in their lifetimes, they could know that, in the end, all would be put right.Like the last book of the Christian Bible, and partially in reference to that narrative,Yeatss The Second Coming is also an apocalypse, in both senses of the word. Theidea that the year 2,000 will conclude a divine cycle of history links such an ending tothe birth of Christ at year zero; mean-while, the rough beast that Yeats imagines isabout to be born is moving toward Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ. In these ways,The Second Coming evokes the Bibles book of Revelation. The remainder of thepoems imagery, however, points to a mythic figure more ancient than Christ theEgyptian sphinx, and the portents of world change are not the same as those inRevelation. This apocalypse, therefore, is unique to Yeatss vision. That it is a form of apocalypse is, nonetheless, unambiguous, first because its central episode is a divinevision that comes from beyond history to trouble the sight of the narrator, and alsobecause the vision is of disaster. The question begged by the poem concerning thepoets vision is whether the change brought by the rough beast is a good one. Is thisa Tate of the overthrow of a good order or a bad one? Is the drowned innocence true,or is it the relic of a world that needed to be cleansed, however violently? While thepoems tone is ominous and its figures are frightening, the fact that it is an apocalypse and is, therefore, a type of narrative that often describes righteous, final violence makes the poems terms fundamentally uncertain. The poets vision asserts thatwhat counts as dark, or innocent, and who is regarded as the best, or the worst, isabout to change and may even be reversed. He envisions a heavy beast that willturn upside down not just the world, but its values as well .Order and Disorder The main theme of The Second Coming is of a flood of disorder that drownsexisting world order. One central image that conveys this theme is the falcon, a birdthat flies in ever-widening circles away from its trainer, but that is meant to returnwhen called back. In The Second Coming, the bird can no longer hear the falconerscry. Taken as a metaphor for the general disorder the poem describes, the bird loosedfrom its return suggests a slackening of communication and a widening of distancebetween he who controls and he who is controlled, signifying the undoing of all.The initial image in the poem, that of the gyre (pronounced with a hard g), can beread as the geometry of the falcons cyclic flight. However, readers familiar withother of Yeatss poems and, particularly, with his cosmogony (as put forth in A Vision ), will recognize the gyre as the hourglass shape that Yeats considers asrepresentative of all life. From the double cone of the gyre, thread spins from just oneplace at any given moment, but that place always contains within it an oppositeinfluence (just as the gyreshaped bobbin is composed of two interpenetrating cones,with the tip of one reaching to the broad base of the other cone). For Yeats, thisdynamic geometry is the shape of history, which he sees as moving in two-thousand-year increments between one extreme, where history will favor utter personalindividuality (and incarnation), and another, where history will endorse interpersonalunity (and disincarnation). Extending this cycle to provide understandings of humanpersonality, Yeats makes his gyre into a symbol for the workings of all of life, whichrotates from one extreme to the other, but which always contains the opposite extreme

within whichever one is manifest. This cyclic view of history differs from one, suchas that of Christianity, that views time as linear moving to a unique future from aparticular point in the past; in this sense alone, Yeatss vision of the end of the worlddiffers from a Christian view. During the early twentieth century, the poet-visionarysaw total disorder trampling order. But this has happened before, and it will happenagain. Indeed, since Yeatss account of history and the alternation between oppositekinds of civilization considers this process to be inevitable the result of the hiddencycle coming forth to balance the cycle in which it was suppressed witnessing theblood-dimmed tide of disorder may even be done dispassionately

Style-

At first, The Second Coming sounds and looks like an early example of free verse,which is poetry unorganized by any strict pattern of rhyme or rhythm. Yeats was,however, no proponent of free verse, which he considered too personal and originalfor him; I must choose a traditional stanza, he decided (as noted in Tindalls William Butler Yeats ). Just so, on closer inspection, The Second Coming is likestrictly rhymed and metered verse that is being actively troubled and undone by itsown content. The style of the poem supports and echoes its topic. It is not so muchfree verse as verse that is being forced into a more chaotic form, and, just as in thepoem, the center cannot hold. The anchoring meter of the poem is iambicpentameter, which consists of lines with five feet, each of which contains twosyllables, first an unaccented one, and then an accented syllable (the effect is ta-TA,like in the word convey). But the poem contains few lines where iambic pentameter is solid and clear, like it is in The falcon cannot hear the falconer, and Thedarkness drops again but now I know. Such solid sound patterns exist in the poem,but they are surrounded by exceptions. The poem opens, for example, with a line of only four strong stresses; and in the middle and last lines of that first stanza, the lines:The ceremony of innocence is drowned, and Are full of passionate intensityforeshorten the rhythm other lines have established. The effect of theseinconsistencies echoes the poems theme of order and center lost, but this effect is allthe stronger for the presence of a metrical example of the order that is on its way out.Similarly, the rhymes in The Second Coming are slight, when remarkable at all, andare eventually lost. While the first two, and second two lines of the first stanza set up

a light aabb rhyme pattern, the rhyme is of the end consonants only, rather than of thevowels and end consonants (like in lake and rake). Even this flavor of rhyme, which iscalled half-rhyme, then dissolves by the end of the stanza. Given this diminishment, itis surprising to see the second stanza begin with two virtually identical lines thatbegin and conclude with identical words, Surely, and is at hand (although therepetition does point to the significance of the event). But again, this tight repetition which we have also seen with the is loosed of the first stanza does not remain.In Yeatss day, many poets had made the abandonment of metric and rhymeconventions a part of their poetry for the new century. In every era, poets havecomposed deeply awkward phrases in an effort to make their verse conform to suchconventions. Yeats, however, was a perfectionist and an able user of conventionalforms, who was capable of composing even and rhymed metrical lines, such as thesein The Spur (1938):You think it terrible that lust and rageShould dance attention upon my old age;They were not such a plague when I was young;What else have I to spur me into song?We can take seriously, then, his decision in The Second Coming to swing his versein and out of such patterns, and we can also judge his word repetitions as significant they do not appear for lack of the poets vocabulary. The emphasis of the soundand rhythm of this poem redouble its identification of destined disorder

This first stanza reflects the point of view of a flaneur. A flaneur is a person who walks the city, in order to experience it; this new literary concept is found a lot in modernist works. Starting in the last half of the 19th Century, there was a noticeable change in population density; people began exchanging their rural lives for city life. The first four lines of this poem are all about rush hour, when everyone is getting off from work and heading home. Yeats is putting himself in this poem as an interactive observer. He is studying the faces of these people, who have just come from their public service 'nine to five' jobs. Their "vivid" faces are those of youthful idealists, who want to change the future of Ireland. He talks to them; thus participating in usual everyday discourse. He wants to relate to these ordinary people, who spend their lives working for people that are wealthier than they are. While on this walk he thinks of a nice story or joke to amuse his friends, which are most likely other writers. "Motley" refers to the clothes worn by a jester, which leads one to believe that these men were also of the theatre. The Abbey Theatre was known for not caring about the serious issues that plagued Ireland. The tone is changed in the last two lines of this poem. "Terrible beauty" is an oxymoron, which is used to describe the dual effect of the Easter Rising. It is terrible, because of all the needless death that occurred during this uprising. It is beautiful, because it opened the eyes of Ireland, which allowed for the creation of the Irish Free State. These last two lines function as a way of reminding the reader of the larger issue facing Ireland. It is repeated in the other stanzas as a way of linking them together; even though each stanza speaks in a different way about the Easter Rising, in Ireland This stanza of the poem is an elegy to the fallen revolutionaries of the Easter Rising .In line 17, "what woman" refers to Constance Markiewicz. She was an Irish revolutionary, politician, suffragette, and socialist. In 1913, Constance's husband moved to the Ukraine, leaving her alone in Ireland. She belonged to the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). She designed the ICA uniforms and wrote their anthem. She was ranked as a lieutenant in the ICA, which allowed her to carry arms. During the Easter Rising, she was stationed at St. Stephen's Green as second in command. She fought the British army along with the rest of her comrades. They only stopped fighting when the British brought them a copy of the surrender order written up by Pearse. There were only seventy women participating in this Rising, and they were all put in solitary confinement after the surrender. She was convicted and sentenced to death, but it was later changed to life in prison. In 1917, she was released from prison along with the others, who had been involved in the Rising, they had been granted amnesty.

Yeats' opinion of Constance does not seem to be very high. He says that she is ignorant. He seems to be reminiscing about how sweet she was when she was young, before she became involved in the political cause. She took part in a man's war and lost her innocence because of it. The fact that she was let out of her death sentence, because she was a woman seemed to really bother him. If she was going to fight like a man then she should die like a man. In the second part of this stanza, "this man" refers to Patrick Henry Pearse. He was a supreme council member of the IRB. He helped to plan the Easter Rising. He surrendered to the British on April 29, 1916 and arrested. He was executed by a firing squad. Pearse was also a teacher, poet, and writer. He founded the school St. Edna, in Dublin. It was a bilingual school for boys. The "winged horse" refers to Pegasus, the horse of the Muses, which is a fitting symbol for him because he was a writer. In line twenty-six, "his helper and friend" refers to Thomas MacDonagh. MacDonagh worked with Pearse at his school, and held the office of Assistant Headmaster and teacher. He was a poet and playwright. He was also a leader in the Easter Rising. His regiment saw little action, because the British army avoided the Jacob Biscuit Factory, which is where he was stationed. He surrendered on April 30 and arrested. He was executed by firing squad on May 3. The final person that Yeats refers to in this stanza is Major John MacBride. He was the husband of Maud Gonne, who was the woman that Yeats had been madly in love with for many years. He was involved in the Easter Rising, but he was not a member of the Irish Volunteers. He didn't plan to get involved, but stumbled upon the fighting and offered to help the rebels. He was executed on May 5. He stood before the firing squad, but he refused to be blind folded. A "vainglorious lout" is an extremely vain and brutish person. In lines 33 and 34, Yeats is referring to the alleged abuse that MacBride inflicted upon Maud during their marriage. This made Yeats very angry, because he was in love with her. "Yet I number him in the song;/ he too has resigned his part" (35-6). Even though Yeats does not like him, he still has to acknowledge that he did die in the Rising. Yeats refers to this rising as a "casual comedy" (37) as a way of saying that human life is extremely undervalued. All these people died, and for what? The third stanza of this poem focuses on nature as a way to discuss the duality of the Rising. A stone that is thrown into a stream displaces water and disrupts the natural order of things; the revolutionaries do the same thing. Their one purpose is to have a free Ireland. The stone, in line forty-three, has many symbolic meanings. It is the symbol of rigidity, which reflects the dedication of the rebels to their political ideals. It also represents Ireland. Jordan states that "one of the well known names of Ireland" [is] 'Inisfail' (Island of the Stone of Destiny)...the Stone of Destiny was one of the four sacred talismans of the Tuatha De Danaan (people of the Goddess Dana), a mystical race of druids and seers who ruled Ireland centuries before the coming of Christianity" (37). The stone is said to be both enchanting and fatal. In these first four lines, Yeats is saying that the revolutionaries are enchanted by the Stone of Destiny to alter the natural order of Ireland with violence. "Birds that range" means birds that sail or pass along; in this case they are sailing amongst the clouds. They are continuously moving; changing their location every minute. In nature, animals are constantly moving forward, they do not dwell in the past. The clouds are even moving, and their reflections can be seen in the stream. The incoming storm can be seen as the impending Easter Rising. A "brim" is the supper surface of a body of water. The horse slides into the river, and is now splashing around in it, disturbing the natural habitat of some birds. "moor-hens" are a medium sized water bird. Nature lives in the moment,

but the natural order of things will soon be disturbed by the Stone of Destiny. The meaning of the stone has been changed in this last stanza, now it symbolizes something that is hard. The heart of Ireland is now stone, taken over by the revolutionaries. Yeats is asking when this needless death is going to quit. He says that in the end God is the only one, who can stop the revolutionaries. "For England may keep faith/ for all that is done and said" (68-9) refers to the Home Rule Act of 1914. The British parliament intended to let Ireland have "self-governance;" however, the act was postponed due to WWI, and it was never enacted. Yeats does not include himself in the poem until this last stanza when he says "we know their dream" (70). Up until this point he had been talking about what other people did or he would talk about himself in the third person; he is now a part of the Irish republic. It is the excess of love that the revolutionaries had for Ireland that got them killed, and the reason why so many others were killed. Yeats does a final count of the dead revolutionaries; however, he omits Constance Markiewicz and replaces her with James Connolly. James Connolly helped to form the Irish Socialist Republican Party, in 1896. He participated in the Easter Rising and was severely injured during combat. He developed gangrene from his wound. The British propped him up in a chair, and the firing squad shot him dead. These revolutionaries may be dead and buried under the green grass, but they will live on forever; influencing and inspiring future revolutionaries. In the end, the true terrible beauty is the revolutionaries themselves. They are the reason the Easter Rising began, and why so many had to die.