The Second Coming: Historical and Literary Context

The Tumultuous 1910s

Yeats composed “The Second Coming” in 1919, at the end of a particularly tumultuous decade for Ireland as well as the wider world. Yeats entered the 1910s on bad terms with Ireland. After a burst of nationalistic feeling at the beginning of the new century, he grew increasingly disenchanted with the oppressive Catholic morality of the Irish middle class. In the early 1910s, however, Irish nationalism again grew to a fever pitch, culminating in the Easter Rising of 1916. Aimed at winning Ireland’s independence from British rule, Irish republicans launched a violent insurrection. The insurrection failed, and the leaders were executed. But the Rising gave Yeats cause to renew his allegiance to Ireland. Meanwhile, these events played out against the backdrop of the First World War, an especially brutal conflict that tore Continental Europe asunder. Finally, just as World War I was ending, Russia was thrust into turmoil with the Revolution of 1917. A bloody conflict there abolished the monarchy and established a new government under socialist leadership. Yeats powerfully reflects the violence of the decade in the first stanza of “The Second Coming,” where the speaker announces (lines 5–6):

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned

Mysticism

Yeats had a longstanding interest in mysticism. In his early years he explored Theosophy, an esoteric religion that draws heavily on Buddhist and Hindu traditions. Later, he became involved in the practice of ritual magic. Yeats’s mystical investigations didn’t significantly influence his poetry until around 1917, when he married Georgina Hyde-Lees. Georgina experimented intensively with automatic writing, a psychic practice in which the writer’s hand serves as an unconscious instrument for a spirit or other immaterial agent. Her experiments yielded thousands of pages of writing, which Yeats studied closely and used to elaborate a detailed theory about the cycles of historical and personal development. Central to his theory is a belief in what he called “gyres,” which are interlocking yet oppositional spirals that influence all developmental patterns. With specific regard to world history, Yeats thought these gyres created cycles that each lasted two thousand years. Whereas the midpoint of each cycle marked a period of civilizational excellence, the end of each cycle was fated to produce cataclysmic change. It is just such a period of transformation that the speaker of “The Second Coming” sees coming as Christianity nears the end of its second millennium of spiritual dominance.

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