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The question of setting is uniquely complicated in the case of “The Second Coming.” On the most concrete level, the speaker provides hints that implicitly date the poem’s present to Yeats’s own time. For instance, lines 4–8 provide several oblique references to the Russian Revolution, a brutal and bloody conflict that took place in 1917. The intensity of the speaker’s reaction to this event suggests that it took place in the recent past. However, readers who miss the allusion to the Russian Revolution will still be able to determine that the poem takes place sometime in the early twentieth century. The speaker confirms as much at the end of the second stanza. In the prophetic vision they articulate there, the speaker describes a sphinx-like creature awakening in the desert after “twenty centuries of stony sleep” (19). The subsequent reference to Bethlehem suggests that the poem takes place a little less than two thousand years after the birth of Christ.

But the matter of setting is more than a simple matter of identifying its historical moment. What’s truly important is the cosmic significance of that historical moment. The prophecy the speaker offers in the poem relates to a mystical vision they have experienced. According to this vision, what’s really going on isn’t just about violence and anarchy. Rather, it’s about a cosmic rupture caused by contrary forces. The speaker references this rupture through the image presented in line 2: “The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” That is, the tether of communication between the bird and its handler has broken down, disconnecting the falcon above from the falconer below. This breakdown suggests a rift between the ethereal plane (above) and the earthly plane (below). This breakdown signals the end of the current world order and the inauguration of a new one. From this vantage, the poem takes place during a radical transformation that occurs at the nexus between two millennial eras.

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