In “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats reflects on the cataclysmic violence that had shattered many parts of the world in the tumultuous 1910s. Yeats wrote the poem in 1919, just one year after World War I ended, two years after the Russian Revolution, and three years after the failed Irish nationalist insurrection known as the Easter Rising. The speaker reflects obliquely on these bloody events in the poem’s stirring first stanza. There, they adopt an apocalyptic register to announce: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (lines 3–4). The speaker then communicates a prophetic vision in which a sphinx-like creature awakens from a two-thousand-year slumber to preside over a new historical age. For the symbolism of “The Second Coming,” Yeats drew heavily on his own mystical theory of history. He illustrated this theory with a diagram made of two spirals. These spirals, which Yeats called “gyres,” are arranged so that the widest part of one spiral circles the narrowest part of the other. The gyres’ contrary motions dictate the organization of history into two-thousand-year cycles separated by periods of cataclysmic transformation. It is just such a period of worldwide transformation that is prophesied in Yeats’s poem.

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