The Second Coming: Themes

The Tumultuous Nature of Transformation

“The Second Coming” takes place in a period of momentous transformation, when one world order is giving way to another. This transformation is nothing if not tumultuous. The speaker indicates as much in the poem’s opening stanza, where they offer an unsettling account of the present moment. Consider just the first four lines:

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

The imagery presented in the first two lines emphasizes disorientation and communication breakdown, which leads to the collapse described in the next two lines. To understand the symbolic significance of this passage, it’s helpful to know that Yeats had a personal theory of history that involved what he called “gyres.” He conceived these gyres as interpenetrating spirals whose opposition to one another created alternating cycles of history. As one of the gyres of history spins out of control, catastrophe looms. To make this metaphysical concept more concrete, imagine the spinning toy known as a top. When the top’s spin begins to slow down, its central axis begins to wobble, causing its gyrations to widen out. The spin becomes increasingly erratic until it collapses. It’s precisely this erratic spinning of the “widening gyre” that marks the tumultuous transition from one era to another.

The Terror of the Unknown

The speaker of “The Second Coming” has a dim vision of the future, and it’s partly because they can’t see a full picture of what’s to come that their prophecy seems so urgent and frightening. Indeed, the unknown is terrifying, and the speaker can’t see very far into the future. All they see, really, is the “vast image” (line 12) of a sphinx-like creature rising from the desert and making its way “towards Bethlehem to be born” (22). Yet it’s crucial to note that, after describing the appearance of this creature, they conclude the poem by posing a question about what this “rough beast” (line 21) really is. This closing question indicates the enigmatic nature of the future. Adding to the ambiguity of the “vast image” is the speaker’s use of the verb “slouching.” A slouching posture can communicate a variety of moods, including exhaustion, laziness, despair, and even defiance. The hunched-over beast also recalls the familiar Gothic trope in which physical decrepitude implies a malevolent or hostile attitude—an implication that often turns out to be false. Thus, if the rough beast’s slouching posture strikes the speaker as ominous, it might only be their own fearful projection about the unknown.

The Metaphysical Unity of the World

Despite its vision of impending cataclysm, “The Second Coming” implicitly affirms that the world is held together by some kind of metaphysical unity. The speaker suggests this unity in the second stanza, just before they introduce their detailed vision of the sphinx-like creature rising from the desert (lines 11–13):

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight

What’s significant about these lines is the way the speaker attributes something called the “Spiritus Mundi” as the source of the “vast image” they’ll describe in the following lines. Here, Yeats uses a Latin phrase that translates to “spirit of the world” or “world spirit.” In the metaphysical system Yeats developed, this world spirit is an immense intelligence to which everyone is connected. Even if ordinary folks can’t readily perceive the world spirit, prophetic figures like this poem’s speaker can reveal it to us by communicating the information they receive from it. It’s important to note, though, that even if we didn’t know about Yeats’s personal theory of the Spiritus Mundi, the very concept of a world spirit suggests a singular entity that somehow holds the world together. The simple fact that the coming cataclysm will affect the whole world offers proof—though admittedly disturbing proof—of the world’s fundamental connectedness.