The Second Coming

On first read, Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” is almost overwhelming: filled with apocalyptic imagery and foreboding language, it’s unclear what is metaphor and what is meant to be reality. Although certain lines seemed to explicitly allude to the end of the world, I wasn’t sure what the poem hoped to convey about it, or what the image of the beast that dominates the second stanza represented. 

The first difficulty I encountered was the question of the speaker. The speaker is never explicitly identified, and seems to hold an almost omniscient perspective. I wondered if the speaker was meant to be a singular person, or perhaps instead some collective consciousness of humanity. Near the end of the second stanza, first-person is used for the first time, where the speaker states that an image “troubles my sight.” I thought this might suggest that the speaker is some human either watching the events unfold or perhaps even experiencing a prophetic vision or dream. I also thought that Yeats may have purposefully laced the narration with ambiguity: the namelessness of the speaker lends the warnings a universal feeling, and the line between reality and imagination is clouded, as the imagery feels almost nightmarish — perhaps to convey that this doomsday is closer to our present moment than we may believe. 

After considering the speaker, I decided to approach the poem a stanza at a time. In the first stanza, the speaker describes a series of images, from an ocean dyed with blood to a falcon.

Examining the rhyme scheme and the sound patterns, I started to understand the message more clearly. The first two lines rhyme, as do the next set of two: “widening gyre” and “the falconer,” “cannot hold” and “upon the world.” Proceeding to the next couplet and the rest of the stanza, though, the rhyme scheme stops. I realized that this mirrors what the first stanza describes: while the speaker remarks that “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” the idea of dissolution of order into chaos is expressed sonically, as the rhyme scheme that had initially provided a semblance of structure breaks down.

Reading the poem out loud, I also noticed that repetition of sounds in the first stanza carries meaning. In the first line, the speaker repeats “Turning and turning,” and in the second, “falcon” and “falconer,” in the fifth and sixth, the word “loosed” appears twice. I didn’t know what a “gyre” was (the first image of the poem), and when I looked it up, I found out that it was a swirl or vortex in the ocean. The repetition seemed to evoke this: as if rotating, the words come back around. And yet, this once again seems to break down as the speaker tries to convey that order is dissolving and anarchy is breaking loose: repetition occurs less frequently, and is split between different lines. The idea of this “gyre” and the cyclical feeling of the sonic pattern also seems like it might speak to some idea of history or nature repeating itself. 

I found an answer to one of my questions about the message of the first stanza at its end. I hadn’t picked up on it during my first read-through, but I realized upon rereading that the final two lines stick out as different from the rest, not quite belonging. Where everything preceding is grounded in nature imagery or more general statements about the state of the world, the final two lines shift suddenly to an assertion about humanity: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” a damning indictment. Looking back, I thought that Yeats might have intentionally tried to mislead with the beginning, painting a picture of a natural apocalypse, only to suggest with this couplet that the cause of the end of the world might instead be the evils of human nature or the selfish “worst” of people.

The second stanza held more confusion for me. The speaker begins by proclaiming repeatedly that the “Second Coming” must be “at hand,” then declares that an image out of “Spiritus Mundi” appears in their view. The Latin phrase felt out of place, and I had no clue what it meant. Looking it up, I learned that Spiritus Mundi means “world spirit” or “world soul” in Latin, a sort of collective unconscious or human memory. The use of Latin, coupled with the meaning, seemed to me to have been deliberately used by Yeats, to yank the reader out of the present moment and call back to a more ancient time.

The most difficult part of the poem for me was the image the speaker describes “[troubling their] sight”: in a desert, a “shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” I looked at the syntax: the speaker unfurls the image slowly, connecting with commas that wind over the course of five lines, in a way that builds a sense of dread in the reader. The diction and figurative language contributes to the impression of this beast as something powerful and primordial: “pitiless as the sun,” “slow thighs,” seemingly to make the audience fear what approaches. 

To fully understand the implications of this image, I had to revisit the poem’s title: The Second Coming. Another difficulty I ran into is that I’m not too familiar with Biblical ideas, so I had to look up the phrase. I learned that the Second Coming is the Christian belief that Jesus will return from heaven; beyond just that, it’s an affirmation of belief that God is in control and will bring about peace and righteousness. 

Understanding this, I suddenly saw new meaning in the rest of the poem. All of the catastrophic events and imagery of the first stanza are meant to herald this Second Coming. The image of the beast suddenly becomes especially striking: Yeats implies that, instead of Jesus returning to Earth, some terrible monster will arrive in his stead. I’d initially been unsure what the beast was meant to represent. Now, I can say that I think it seems to function as a symbol of the idea that the belief in some eventual justice and peace will never truly come. The implication might be that human nature has thrown off the balance of the world and corrupted it to an extent where the Second Coming becomes a perversion of the Christian idea. It’s also interesting that the image of the beast, “lion body and the head of a man,” calls to mind the Egyptian Sphinx, a different belief system, another way in which the Christian idea of the Second Coming is undermined. 

The poem’s ending helped me further the interpretation I’d landed on. The speaker remarks that “darkness drops again; but now I know / That twenty centuries of stony sleep / Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.” This seems to suggest that the monster settles back down, but the speaker now understands that it will soon awake; I thought that the “rocking cradle” might also imply that the “beast” or evil is something stirred up by the state of the world at the time. It ends on a question, and the uncertainty adds to the piece’s overall precarious feeling that something is about to break.

The final part of my reading process was to look up the context. Yeats wrote the poem in 1919, in the aftermath of World War I. It seems that he might have wanted to communicate with the poem that, with the violence and anarchy of the war, humanity has reached a point from which it cannot return, one that has erased the possibility of eventual peace and righteousness and replaced it with a darker new age. Although the poem is intricate enough that I can’t say that I have a perfect grasp on it, I understand better now what he might have hoped to say with it.