The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
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 blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
When William Butler Yeats published The Second Coming in 1920,
Ireland was in the middle of the war of independence.
Further afield the First World War had drawn to a close,
while Russia was experiencing the effects of their 1917 Revolutions.
In response, he produced a terrifying poem
about the war-torn landscape he saw before him,
and the fears he harbored for the future.
The poem starts with small repetitions of language and circular imagery.
This is troubled by the falcon who fails to return to its origin point,
which suggests that the cycle of life is falling apart
- and reflects the poet’s acute sense of crisis.
As his disillusionment grew,
Yeats grew increasingly preoccupied with alternative visions of the universe,
which he contributed to with his book, A Vision.
This work includes multiple diagrams that depict time
in the form of spirals and vortexes,
moving towards an inevitable end.
It’s an image that’s mirrored in the widening gyre,
and the impression of a world spinning out of control.
The last lines speculate on the earth’s final hour,
and offer a chilling image of encroaching disaster:
what rough beast, its hour come round at last/
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Yeats doesn’t elaborate on this hulking shadow,
but it's a figure that’s come to be associated with a sense of impending doom
- and it takes on particular significance
when a moment of uncertainty is at hand.