The Second Coming

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Rhyme

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Literary Devices Rhyme

As a poem written in blank verse, “The Second Coming” doesn’t contain any strong rhymes. That said, Yeats does occasionally use inexact—or slant—rhymes. Two slant rhymes appear in the first four lines, approximating a traditional quatrain with an AABB rhyme scheme:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Though the reader may have to strain to hear the slant rhymes, there is enough of a sonic similarity to make two rough rhyme pairs: “gyre” and “falconer,” and “hold” and “world.” The vagueness of the sonic resemblances in these pairs has significance for the poem at large, which is generally concerned with discerning the similarities between signs. The speaker has observed a number of signs which indicate that the current world order is ending and another is beginning. Yet the uncertainty of this speculation is reflected in the haziness of the initial rhymes. By the beginning of the second stanza, however, the speaker seems much more certain (lines 9–10):

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

Here, the speaker announces just how “sure” they are that the current signs exactly repeat the signs that attended the first coming of Christ. They reflect this certainty on a formal level with the poem’s only instance of identical rhyme, in which a word is made to rhyme with itself.