Summary
The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon,
turning in a widening “gyre” (spiral), cannot hear the falconer;
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”; anarchy is loosed upon
the world; “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The
ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The best people, the speaker
says, lack all conviction, but the worst “are full of passionate
intensity.”
Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation;
“Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” No sooner does he think of
“the Second Coming,” then he is troubled by “a vast image of the Spiritus
Mundi, or the collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in
the desert, a giant sphinx (“A shape with lion body and the head
of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun”) is moving,
while the shadows of desert birds reel about it. The darkness drops
again over the speaker’s sight, but he knows that the sphinx’s twenty
centuries of “stony sleep” have been made a nightmare by the motions
of “a rocking cradle.” And what “rough beast,” he wonders, “its
hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Form
“The Second Coming” is written in a very rough iambic
pentameter, but the meter is so loose, and the exceptions so frequent,
that it actually seems closer to free verse with frequent heavy
stresses. The rhymes are likewise haphazard; apart from the two
couplets with which the poem opens, there are only coincidental
rhymes in the poem, such as “man” and “sun.”
Commentary
Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying
ritualistic language, “The Second Coming” is one of Yeats’s most
famous and most anthologized poems; it is also one of the most thematically
obscure and difficult to understand. (It is safe to say that very
few people who love this poem could paraphrase its meaning to satisfaction.)
Structurally, the poem is quite simple—the first stanza describes
the conditions present in the world (things falling apart, anarchy,
etc.), and the second surmises from those conditions that a monstrous
Second Coming is about to take place, not of the Jesus we first
knew, but of a new messiah, a “rough beast,” the slouching sphinx
rousing itself in the desert and lumbering toward Bethlehem. This
brief exposition, though intriguingly blasphemous, is not terribly
complicated; but the question of what it should signify to a reader
is another story entirely.
Yeats spent years crafting an elaborate, mystical theory
of the universe that he described in his book A Vision. This
theory issued in part from Yeats’s lifelong fascination with the
occult and mystical, and in part from the sense of responsibility
Yeats felt to order his experience within a structured belief system.
The system is extremely complicated and not of any lasting importance—except
for the effect that it had on his poetry, which is of extraordinary
lasting importance. The theory of history Yeats articulated in A
Vision centers on a diagram made of two conical spirals,
one inside the other, so that the widest part of one of the spirals rings
around the narrowest part of the other spiral, and vice versa. Yeats
believed that this image (he called the spirals “gyres”) captured
the contrary motions inherent within the historical process, and
he divided each gyre into specific regions that represented particular
kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological
phases of an individual’s development).
“The Second Coming” was intended by Yeats to describe
the current historical moment (the poem appeared in 1921)
in terms of these gyres. Yeats believed that the world was on the
threshold of an apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end
of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the
inner gyre. In his definitive edition of Yeats’s poems, Richard
J. Finneran quotes Yeats’s own notes:
