Summary
The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a
widening "gyre" (spiral), cannot hear the falconer; "Things fall apart;
the center cannot hold"; anarchy is loosed upon the world; "The
blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is
drowned." The best people, the speaker says, lack all conviction, but the
worst "are full of passionate intensity."
Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; "Surely the
Second Coming is at hand." No sooner does he think of "the Second Coming,"
then he is troubled by "a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the
collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx ("A
shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless
as the sun") is moving, while the shadows of desert birds reel about it.
The darkness drops again over the speaker's sight, but he knows that the
sphinx's twenty centuries of "stony sleep" have been made a nightmare by
the motions of "a rocking cradle." And what "rough beast," he wonders,
"its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
Form
"The Second Coming" is written in a very rough iambic pentameter, but the
meter is so loose, and the exceptions so frequent, that it actually seems
closer to free verse with frequent heavy stresses. The rhymes are likewise
haphazard; apart from the two couplets with which the poem opens, there
are only coincidental rhymes in the poem, such as "man" and "sun."
Commentary
Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic
language, "The Second Coming" is one of Yeats's most famous and most
anthologized poems; it is also one of the most thematically obscure and
difficult to understand. (It is safe to say that very few people who love
this poem could paraphrase its meaning to satisfaction.) Structurally, the
poem is quite simple--the first stanza describes the conditions present in
the world (things falling apart, anarchy, etc.), and the second surmises
from those conditions that a monstrous Second Coming is about to take
place, not of the Jesus we first knew, but of a new messiah, a "rough
beast," the slouching sphinx rousing itself in the desert and lumbering
toward Bethlehem. This brief exposition, though intriguingly blasphemous,
is not terribly complicated; but the question of what it should signify to
a reader is another story entirely.
Yeats spent years crafting an elaborate, mystical theory of the universe
that he described in his book A Vision. This theory issued in part
from Yeats's lifelong fascination with the occult and mystical, and in
part from the sense of responsibility Yeats felt to order his experience
within a structured belief system. The system is extremely complicated and
not of any lasting importance--except for the effect that it had on his
poetry, which is of extraordinary lasting importance. The theory of
history Yeats articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram made of
two conical spirals, one inside the other, so that the widest part of one
of the spirals rings around the narrowest part of the other spiral, and
vice versa. Yeats believed that this image (he called the spirals "gyres")
captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process, and
he divided each gyre into specific regions that represented particular
kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological
phases of an individual's development).
"The Second Coming" was intended by Yeats to describe the current
historical moment (the poem appeared in 1921) in terms of these gyres.
Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic
revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak
roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre. In his definitive edition
of Yeats's poems, Richard J. Finneran quotes Yeats's own notes:
The
end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of
the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of
greatest expansion and of the other to its place of greatest
contraction... The revelation [that] approaches will... take its character
from the contrary movement of the interior gyre...
In other words, the world's trajectory along the gyre of science,
democracy, and heterogeneity is now coming apart, like the frantically
widening flight-path of the falcon that has lost contact with the
falconer; the next age will take its character not from the gyre of
science, democracy, and speed, but from the contrary inner gyre--which,
presumably, opposes mysticism, primal power, and slowness to the science
and democracy of the outer gyre. The "rough beast" slouching toward
Bethlehem is the symbol of this new age; the speaker's vision of the
rising sphinx is his vision of the character of the new world.
This seems quite silly as philosophy or prophecy (particularly in light of
the fact that it has not come true as yet). But as poetry, and understood
more broadly than as a simple reiteration of the mystic theory of A
Vision, "The Second Coming" is a magnificent statement about the
contrary forces at work in history, and about the conflict between the
modern world and the ancient world. The poem may not have the thematic
relevance of Yeats's best work, and may not be a poem with which many
people can personally identify; but the aesthetic experience of its
passionate language is powerful enough to ensure its value and its
importance in Yeats's work as a whole.
