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The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

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Turning and turning in the widening gyre

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The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

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Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

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Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

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The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

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The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

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The best lack all conviction, while the worst

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Are full of passionate intensity.

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Surely some revelation is at hand;

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Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

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The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

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When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

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Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

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A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

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A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

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Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

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Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

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The darkness drops again; but now I know

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That twenty centuries of stony sleep

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Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

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And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

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Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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When William Butler Yeats published The Second Coming in 1920,

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Ireland was in the middle of the war of independence.

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Further afield the First World War had drawn to a close,

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while Russia was experiencing the effects of their 1917 Revolutions.

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In response, he produced a terrifying poem

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about the war-torn landscape he saw before him,

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and the fears he harbored for the future.

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The poem starts with small repetitions of language and circular imagery.

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This is troubled by the falcon who fails to return to its origin point,

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which suggests that the cycle of life is falling apart

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- and reflects the poet’s acute sense of crisis.

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As his disillusionment grew,

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Yeats grew increasingly preoccupied with alternative visions of the universe,

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which he contributed to with his book, A Vision.

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This work includes multiple diagrams that depict time

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in the form of spirals and vortexes,

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moving towards an inevitable end.

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It’s an image that’s mirrored in the widening gyre,

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and the impression of a world spinning out of control.

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The last lines speculate on the earth’s final hour,

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and offer a chilling image of encroaching disaster:

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what rough beast, its hour come round at last/

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Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Yeats doesn’t elaborate on this hulking shadow,

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but it's a figure that’s come to be associated with a sense of impending doom

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- and it takes on particular significance

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when a moment of uncertainty is at hand.