The Second Coming: Motifs

Vision and Blindness

“The Second Coming” is, above all, a prophetic poem. And, as with most examples of prophecy, the speaker’s insight into the future entails a paradoxical balance between vision and blindness. Yeats reflects this central paradox of insight at several moments in the poem, where the speaker’s future vision is clouded. For instance, when the speaker introduces their prophecy, they declare: “a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight” (lines 12–13). The word troubles has two meanings. Most concretely, the speaker feels psychologically and spiritually perturbed by the “vast image.” However, we could also interpret the phrase “troubles my sight” more literally, as in, “makes it difficult to see.” Such difficulty in sight symbolically mirrors the sphinx-like creature, which has “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” (line 15). The challenge to sight is also subtly emphasized in the poem’s various references to “shadows” (line 17), “darkness” (17), and even “the blood-dimmed tide” (5). These references to diminished vision reflect the fact that, no matter how clairvoyant the speaker may be, their future vision remains incomplete. Hence why the poem ends with a question (lines 21–22):

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The speaker cannot see clearly enough to be certain of what’s to come.

Passive Voice

Passive voice is a grammatical concept that pertains to the relationship between subject and verb. In active voice, the subject performs the action, as in: “The child eats the cookie.” Here, the child is the subject and performs the act of eating the cookie. In passive voice, by contrast, the subject is acted upon, as in: “The cookie is eaten by the child.” Here, the cookie is the subject, and it gets eaten by the child. As this second example illustrates, passive voice is so called because the subject remains passive as things happen to it. Indeed, the cookie is seemingly powerless to do anything as the child eats it! Yeats uses passive voice in the first stanza of “The Second Coming” to emphasize a similar kind of powerlessness. Consider lines 4–6:

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned

Each line features an instance of passive voice. In each case, the speaker underscores a different way in which society is being overwhelmed by forces it cannot contain. The world thus proves powerless in the face of a great cataclysm.

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