the second coming poetry essay

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ delves into the hopeless atmosphere of post-World War I Europe through apocalyptic imagery.

William Butler Yeats

Nationality: Irish

He passed away in January 1939 after a career in prose , drama , and poetry.

Key Poem Information

Unlock more with Poetry +

Central Message: Chaos is a never-ending cycle

Themes: Religion , War

Speaker: Unknown (likely the poet himself)

Emotions Evoked: Anxiety , Fear , Hopelessness , Nervousness , Panic , Stress , Terror

Poetic Form: Ode

Time Period: 20th Century

Poem Analyzed by Elise Dalli

B.A. Honors Degree in English and Communications

At the time of ‘The Second Coming’ being written, much of the world had grown disillusioned with the turn of the century. From ushering in new and wonderful inventions – the motorcar, small aircraft, and others – it had gone to fray apart. In different parts of the world, a revolution brewed and broke out: the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Easter Uprising of 1916, and, of course, the First World War (1914-1918), the most horrific, bloody battle that anyone in Europe had ever seen, totaling a death rate that had since been unmatched in history. With all these events behind, it was no wonder that poets, writers, and artists of all kinds felt as though there was a great shift in the world happening, and that it would soon come to an end.

Log in or join Poetry + to access Poem Printable PDFs.

Explore The Second Coming

• 2 Analysis, Stanza by Stanza
• 3 Historical Background

‘The Second Coming’ was William Butler Yeats’ ode to the era. Rife with Christian imagery , and pulling much inspiration from apocalyptic writing, Yeats’   ‘The Second Coming’ tries to put into words what countless people of the time felt: that it was the end of the world as they knew it and that nothing else would ever be the same again.

The First World War had shaken the foundations of knowledge for many, and scarred from the knowledge of the ‘war to end all wars’, they could no longer reconcile themselves with a time before the Great War. This poem is the literary version of that: a lack of ability to think of a time before the war.

Analysis, Stanza by Stanza

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.

Much has been written on the apocalypse, and many of those writings focus on the harbingers of the event: it is always bloody and massive, a vicious explosion that shakes the world to its foundation. In Yeats’ poem, the apocalypse is a much quieter, more understated , affair. It opens up with the disturbance of nature.

‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer’.

Falcons were used as hunting animals since the medieval era. They are incredibly smart, and dedicated to their trainers, responding immediately to any noise that their handler makes, thus for the falcon to have flown so rapidly out of the reach of the falconer shows us how the delicate balance of the world has been upset. It’s a particularly Shakespearian tactic to reflect evil in the way that nature behaves. In Macbeth , when the villainous Macbeth murders the good king, a lowly porter recognizes that the horses have started to eat each other and that there was a great and thunderous storm. This is the same manipulation of imagery, using the innocent vision of nature to imply a great warping in the fabric of things as they should have been. We see it throughout the first stanza : Yeats’ words take on an edge of doomed and destroyed innocence (‘things fall apart, the center cannot hold’). The very world as he knew it – here no doubt represented in the immediate world as Yeats knew it, which was Europe – has started to crumble. The Great War is still fresh on his mind, and the phrase ‘the centre cannot hold’ can also represent the battles that were fought in France, battles that left the country scarred beyond repair, and struggling in the aftermath of the war. ‘Blood-dimmed tide’, also, can reference the same war, but aside from the historical link, there is again that idea of nature warped by man – blood-dimmed tide, water corrupted by spilled blood, by war, by an encroaching and violent end.

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 around 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?

In the second stanza, the Biblical imagery takes over the visions of corrupted nature. From the start, Yeats ties his poem to religion by stating ‘the Second Coming is at hand’, and conjuring up a picture of a creature with a lion’s body and a man’s head, much like the sphynx, and a gaze as ‘blank and pitiless as the sun’. By comparing it to the very nature that Yeats spoke about in the first part of the poem, he brings out the almost infallible quality of this beast: like nature, it feels nothing for the suffering of man. It is and will be when man has turned to ash and dust in its weak.

It is worth noting that Yeats believed that poets were privy to spiritual ‘after images’ of symbols and memories recurring in history, and especially available to souls of a sensitive nature such as poets. Here, the Spiritus Mundi is the soul of the Universe, rattling in the wake of the coming apocalypse, delivering to Yeats the image of the beast that will destroy the world, and him with it. The beast will come, Yeats is assured of this, but not yet; by the end of the poem, the veil has dropped again, the monster is no longer, and Yeats writes that ‘twenty centuries of stony sleep / were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle’, implying that whatever is coming for the world, whatever monster, will be here soon. It is not yet born, but the world is right for it, and waiting for it, and Yeats is certain that the rough beast ‘its hour come round at last’ is only a few years away from wracking the world into a state of complete destruction.

Historical Background

W.B. Yeats was an Irish poet born on the 13th of June, 1865. He is considered a largely Irish poet, although he ran in British literary circles as well, and he was a big part of the resurgence of Irish literature. In 1923, he was to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for his poetry , as the first Irishman. This was shortly after Ireland had finally gained independence from England.

Yeats died in France in 1939, and his remains were moved to Sligo on his wishes in 1948.

Get PDFs for this Poem

Log in or join Poetry + to access all PDFs for this poem.

Home » William Butler Yeats » The Second Coming

About Elise Dalli

Join the poetry chatter and comment.

Exclusive to Poetry + Members

Join Conversations

Share your thoughts and be part of engaging discussions.

Expert Replies

Get personalized insights from our Qualified Poetry Experts.

Connect with Poetry Lovers

Build connections with like-minded individuals.

What about the last line Elise? You miss the whole point of the poem.

What do you think the point is?

That a materialistic world of selfish individualism (the wilful falcon, lack of conviction, passionate intensity) is doomed. It is not that nature has “been warped by man”, but that mankind has succumbed to nature which is pitiless, not innocent, not guilty, just pitiless.Yet there is maybe a way to avoid doom. The analysis is written from a very modern world “worship of nature” viewpoint, quite, quite different from Yeats mindset. He wrote beautifully in describing nature and the beauty it offers. But he was no materialist. Yeats claimed to have lost his religious faith as a young man, but spent his intellectual life seeking something to replace it.Try his poem,”The Song of the Wandering Aengus” for an utterly accessible and poetically masterful account of that yearning. The last lines of this poem suggest that he never found a replacement, and that the Christian ethic, the lost “ceremony of innocence” referred …  Read more »

Thank you for your really thoughtful critique. I am really impressed by your knowledge and understanding of Yeats and how that informs your views and opinions. I will absolutely check out your suggested reading.

Christ known for love and mercy was born at Bethlehem a haloed place. He came as a saviour of Man.All that is about to change. A merciless brute is inching towards Bethlehem to be born.With its arrival, there will be all out chaos with no signs of hope in the horizon.

You’re welcome.

I am searching for short questiin about this poem.

Do you mean you’d like us to give you a question you could ask, as in for a class to answer?

Please proofread/correct errors in the analysis: “It is worth nothing that Yeats…” at beginning of 4th paragraph “W. B. Yeats was an Irish poem…” at beginning of Historical Background

For me, perhaps unfairly, errors such as these detract from the value of the analysis.

Amended – totally understandable. It’s some times tricky to catch misspelled words that are real words! But I get where you are coming from.

This is one of the best and yet the most ambiguous of Yeats’ poems. To suggest just one interpretation of it would be to do it a disservice. The beast especially has a very mythological quality.

The “second coming” refers to the coming of the Antichrist … twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle .. well what happened twenty centuries ago? answer the birth of Christ .. and why was it “vexed to sleep”? .. vexed loosely means frustrated or failed, hence the first coming (of the Antichrist) was thwarted or prevented, but prevented by what? … by the first coming of Christ (the “rocking cradle” which rocked back and forth two thousand years ago in Bethlehem … very obvious reference to Christ. And why is the beast slouching to Bethlehem to be born? .. because it wants to usurp or counter-thwart its previously frustrated attempt to be born two thousand years ago, or 20 centuries prior by Christ … obviously the Antichrist wants to take Christ’s place now that the world is turning evil: chaos reigns, the center does …  Read more »

Absolutely Richard. I really think this comment adds to the existing analysis which only briefly touches on the apocalyptic nature of the poem.

Access the Complete PDF Guide of this Poem

Poetry+ PDF Guides are designed to be the ultimate PDF Guides for poetry. The PDF Guide consists of a front cover, table of contents, with the full analysis, including the Poetry+ Review Corner and numerically referenced literary terms, plus much more.

Get the PDF Guide

Experts in Poetry

Our work is created by a team of talented poetry experts, to provide an in-depth look into poetry, like no other.

Cite This Page

Dalli, Elise. "The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/william-butler-yeats/the-second-coming/ . Accessed 21 August 2024.

Help Center

Request an Analysis

(not a member? Join now)

Poem PDF Guides

PDF Learning Library

Beyond the Verse Podcast

Poetry Archives

Poetry Explained

Poet Biographies

Useful Links

Poem Explorer

Poem Generator

[email protected]

Poem Solutions Limited, International House, 36-38 Cornhill, London, EC3V 3NG, United Kingdom

(and discover the secrets to understanding poetry)

Get Free PDFs to Help You Learn Poetry

Download Poetry PDF Guides

Complete Poetry PDF Guide

Perfect Offline Resource

Covers Everything Need to Know

One-pager 'snapshot' PDF

Offline Resource

Gateway to deeper understanding

Get this Poem Analysis as an Offline Resource

Poetry+ PDF Guides are designed to be the ultimate PDF Guides for poetry. The PDF Guide contains everything to understand poetry.

A Short Analysis of Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’

A summary and analysis of one of W. B. Yeats’s most famous poems by Dr Oliver Tearle

‘The Second Coming’ is one of W. B. Yeats’s best-known poems , and its meaning has eluded many readers because of its oblique references and ambiguous images. What follows is a short summary and analysis of the poem. What does ‘the second coming’ refer to, and how does it fit with Yeats’s own beliefs?

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?

‘The Second Coming’: summary

In the run-up to the millennium, the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ – traditionally, anyway – many people began to consider the possibility of this ‘Second Coming’ more.) The ‘gyre’ metaphor Yeats employs in the first line (denoting circular motion and repetition) is a nod to Yeats’s mystical belief that history repeats itself in cycles.

But the gyre is ‘widening’: it is getting further and further away from its centre, its point of origin. In short, it’s losing control, and ‘the centre cannot hold’.

But what sort of Second Coming will it be? It’s almost been ‘twenty centuries’, or 2,000 years, since Christ came to Earth in human form and was crucified; what ‘rough beast’ will reveal itself this time? Perhaps it will not be a Christ in human form, but something altogether different.

The reference to  Spiritus Mundi , literally ‘spirit of the world’, is, like the ‘gyre’, another allusion to Yeats’s beliefs: for Yeats, the  Spiritus Mundi  was a sort of collective soul containing all of mankind’s cultural memories – not just Christian memories, but those from other societies.

‘The Second Coming’: analysis

‘A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun’ suggests something altogether different from Jesus Christ – it’s got more in common with the Sphinx, that giant stone sculpture of a human-cat hybrid found near the Pyramids at Giza (Yeats’s word ‘gaze’ even faintly suggests ‘Giza’), which belongs to a different civilisation from the Christian one, and indeed predated it.

Similarly, the other famous sphinx, the one that posed a riddle about mankind to Oedipus , belongs to yet another religious and cultural tradition: the ancient Greeks. The effect of this is to decentre Christianity (‘the centre cannot hold’, after all) from its apparently secure place in western civilisation, and to question what form a ‘Second Coming’, if it occurs, might take. Perhaps other civilisations, after all, have been waiting for their deities to return.

The famous lines in the first stanza of the poem describe a time of chaos:

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.

‘Things fall apart’ was used by Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe as the title of his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart – tellingly, about the chaos that empire had created on the African continent (compare Harold Macmillan’s ‘winds of change’ speech about Africa).

Although these events – African countries gaining their independence from European imperial powers – were quite a way off when Yeats wrote the poem, they are nevertheless relevant since they point up another context for ‘The Second Coming’: the First World War, only recently over when Yeats wrote ‘The Second Coming’, had also shaken up empires, and, indeed, led to the fall of four of them (the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, German, and Russian).

Note how Yeats’s words in the above passage suggest the chaotic nature of world events and the disaster this spells: loosed and world suggests this worldwide anarchy, only for the two words to become joined in that doom-laden word, worst , a few lines later. Worldwide chaos is the worst thing that could happen right now, and is bleakly ominous.

Indeed, although the poem is unrhymed, like many poems written around this time – such as poems of the First World War by Wilfred Owen and others – it utilises other techniques that stand in for traditional rhyme: pararhyme ( hold/world , man/sun ), repetition ( at hand/at hand ), and what we might call semantic rhyme ( sleep/cradle ). These are worth analysing and pondering on in more detail. And then we have the wordplay:

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 word order in that final line, with the verb ‘Reel’ being placed before the noun, summons up the spectre of a homophone, ‘Real’ – but shadows are not real, so this is an illusion, a desert mirage.

Indeed, like another great modernist poem about the fallout of the First World War, T. S. Eliot’s  The Waste Land , Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ fuses images and themes involving apocalypse, the desert, religion, and the fall of civilisations. The poem also carries echoes of Shelley’s enigmatic poem ‘Ozymandias’, which we’ve analysed here .

Many of Yeats’s most celebrated poems end with a question: ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ (‘ Among School Children ’); ‘Did she put on his knowledge with his power / Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?’ (‘ Leda and the Swan ’). ‘The Second Coming’ is another such poem. It’s elusive and ambiguous, defying any straightforward analysis. Partly this is what makes it so compelling: it is a poem that asks questions, rather than providing answers. We haven’t tried to offer any easy answers here, but merely drawn attention to some details of the poem which are of interest.

About W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest of all Irish poets. His first collection, Crossways , appeared in 1889 when he was still in his mid-twenties, and his early poetry bore the clear influence of Romanticism. As his career developed and literary innovations came with modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century, Yeats’s work retained its focus on traditional verse forms and rhyme schemes, but he became more political, more allusive, and more elliptical.

His late work, such as his 1927 poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, about growing old, show a thoughtful and contemplative poet whose imagery and references defy easy exegesis (what exactly does the ancient city of Byzantium represent in this poem?). And yet, at the same time, there is a directness to his work which makes readers feel personally addressed, and situates his work always at one remove from more famous modernist poets (such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound).

Yeats died in 1939. Throughout much of his life, a woman named Maud Gonne was his muse. Yeats asked her to marry him several times, but she always refused. She knew she could be of more use to him as a muse than as a wife or lover. Yeats was in favour of Irish independence but, in poems such as ‘Easter 1916’ which respond to the Easter Rising, he reveals himself to be uneasy with the violent and drastic political and military methods adopted by many of his compatriots. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

Image: W. B. Yeats by George Charles Beresford, 1911;  Wikimedia Commons .

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.

Type your email…

11 thoughts on “A Short Analysis of Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’”

It sounds as if we are in that period right now.

Yeats was connected with Theosophy, a spiritual movement that began in the 19th century, and continues today in places like Halcyon, California. The Theosophists hold to the idea of cycles, which could explain his emphasis on that.

There is a movie clip I combine with this poem which has Hopkins as Nixon and he’s speaking with Sam — who is the head of the CIA. The context is perfect.

Thanks for posting this analysis of a great poem by Yeats.

Thanks for this. Great poem but I’ve never really understood it so this is really helpful.

• Pingback: A Short Analysis of Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ | JCU // Creative Writing Workshop

I love Yeats, but is it wrong that I looked at that picture and though of Mark Ruffalo?

I always took it as a dark Advent poem. The final line “…and what rough beast its hour come at last slouches towards Bethlehem to be born” is actually quite horrifying as though something terrible has lurched from the shadows instead of the meek and gentle savior the world expects. This poem and “The Two Trees” are two of my favorite verses of all time. I think they show how much of a mystic Yeats was, something I knew since high school but only realized how much so lately. Excellent analysis by the way, too!

• Pingback: A Short Analysis of Yeats’s ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ | Interesting Literature

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, considering what’s happening in the Middle East, and has been happening in there for centuries, seems to have very little to do with the birth of Jesus, and more to do with the hatching place of God.

• Pingback: 10 of the Best W. B. Yeats Quotations – Interesting Literature

Comments are closed.

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

The Second Coming

Historical and literary context.

W. B. Yeats was one of the most prominent Irish poets along with Seamus Heaney. Born in 1865, he began writing at the age of seventeen. The poem The Second Coming was published in his collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer in 1921.

The Second Coming Summary

Stanza i (line 1-8).

The poem begins with the speaker saying that a falcon is turning again and again in a widening spiral and it cannot hear the call of its owner. Things break and fall off while the center can no longer hold it. 

Stanza II (line 9-22)

The speaker says that the rough beast slowly moves towards Bethlehem where it will be born.

The Second Coming Themes

Christianity, civilization, the second coming literary analysis.

The speaker sees in his vision, the coming of a beast in a desert. The beast has the body of a lion while the head of a human. It has an expression that is empty of any kind of pity. It moves slowly while the disturbed birds of the desert fly all around it. 

Significance of the Title

Point of view.

The poem is written in a third-person narrative where the speaker of the poem is an unknown person but we still have some clues in the poem, about the speaker of the poem.

Though the chaos remains a mystery, the speaker gives a clue about it so we can say that the speaker is a visionary.

He desperately wants the second coming to happen and here is where the emotions are at height but then the tone becomes uncertain and doubtful towards the end of the poem as the speaker tells about the birth of a beast.

Troub les my sight : some where in sands of the de sert (line 13)

The beast might also represent the human civilization that has a “gaze” that is empty of any type of empathy and that is ready to prey.

Literary Devices

Alliteration.

The f alcon cannot hear the f alconer; (line 2)

Alliteration in the above lines represents disorientation and confused movement. The repetition of the consonant sound /f/ shows that there is a huge distance between the falcon and the falconer. It shows that the gap between them cannot be bridged.

The next example of alliteration is where the vision of the Spiritus Mundi is described:

The next example of alliteration is:

Were vexed to nightmare by a r ocking cradle, (line 20)

The repetition of the consonant sound /r/ creates an atmosphere of threat and violence while the consonant sound /b/ gives a sense of the beast taking and its shape and coming to life.

It clarifies a difference between the two, that the best lack any type of conviction while the worst have passionate intensity.

The word “surely” expresses a personal opinion that the speaker gives in order to point towards the second coming. The speaker thinks that the second coming, predicted in the Bible, is closer. There is an air of desperation when the speaker talks about the second coming. 

Is m o ving its sl o w thighs, while all about it (line 16)

That twenty centuries of st o ny sleep (line 19)

The above lines have a repetition of the long vowel sound /o/ that shows the movement of a new beastly creature and the progress of its coming to life.

And what rough beast, its h ou r come r ou nd at last, (line 21)

The first stanza of the poem is like one long sentence made of several independent clauses. 

Things fall apart ; the centre cannot hold; (line 3)

The best lack all conviction , while the worst (line 7)

The comma in the above line is used to develop antithesis between the best and worst.

Tur n ing a n d tur n ing i n the wide n ing gyre (line 1)

The repetition of the consonant sound /n/ reflects confused and repeated movements of the falcon due to the lost connection with its master.

The bloo d-d imme d ti d e is loose d, an d everywhere (line 5)

The consonant sound /d/ is flooded through the lines reflecting that “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed”. 

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert (line 13)

Surely a revelation is at hand ; (line 9)

The speaker believes that the second coming ought to come and is very close but the vision set in the following lines is opposite to what the speaker expects.

Rhetorical Question

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, (line 4)

The speaker talks about the second coming for the first without any fear or desperation but when he repeats it in the next line, he repeats it with an air of desperation and anxiety.

Rhyme Scheme

More from william butler yeats.

The Second Coming

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?

Meanings of The Second Coming

Meanings of stanza -1.

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.

Meanings of Stanza -2

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?

Summary of The Second Coming

Analysis of literary devices in “the second coming”, analysis of poetic devices in the second coming, quotes to be used.

“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.”

Related posts:

Post navigation.

Poems & Poets

The Second Coming

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

The Second Coming

By william butler yeats, the second coming essay questions.

How does "The Second Coming" reflect the historical context of the time in which it was written?

"The Second Coming" was written just after World War I, and it was also a reaction to the Irish War of Independence and the Bolshevik Revolution. These were ideological conflicts that questioned the very fabric of civilization. The Bolshevik Revolution was a rebellion, led by Lenin, which dismantled the Tsarist autocracy and led to the rise of the Soviet Union. This revolution followed World War I, another conflict that disrupted established national boundaries and international order.

The poem was also written when Ireland was being torn apart by civil war. Yeats wrote passionately and frequently about conflict, especially conflict in Ireland, and was particularly fearful of mob rule, of the sort that elected totalitarian governments in Russia and Italy.

Throughout his career, Yeats continued to write about the rise and fall of civilizations, lamenting both the inconsistency and disorder of the time period in which he lived and also the bitterness and disillusionment that haunted so many people during this time. This war of ideals—jadedness and love, fear and hope—rose out of a tumultuous time in history, and inspired the tension, confusion, and emotional intensity that characterizes "The Second Coming".

How (and why) does "The Second Coming" use mythology and ancient themes to express the onset of modernity?

"The Second Coming" is a poem that operates like a circle, and so in some ways it ends where it began. By using mythological themes like a reference to Latin (with "Spiritus Mundi") and to a sphinx to represent the oncoming future, Yeats is implying that Christianity's reign is ending and so the world is settling back into a primal, pagan state like the one it existed in before the rise of Christianity and modern civilization. Mythology in this poem represents polytheistic religions and an absence of structure and order.

Describe Yeats's "The Second Coming" in relationship to several works it has inspired. Why has "The Second Coming" persisted in the popular imagination?

"The Second Coming" has inspired several works including Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart and Joan Didion's essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Achebe's Things Fall Apart describes an apocalyptic, world-changing series of events—but instead of focusing on the West's own internal collapse, like Yeats's original poem, it focuses on the West's encroachment on Africa. In Achembe's novel, the West and colonialism are the "rough beasts" which come in a bloody tide to change the world forever.

Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is the title of a series of essays describing her experiences in the 1960s, living in San Francisco's Height-Ashbury district during the hippie renaissance, dealing with her own existential concerns. It focuses on the large-scale implications of the counterculture, which questioned predesigned orders and also created chaos, as well as moral questions of modernity and consumerism.

Both of these works riff on Yeats's original dark prophetic vision, bending it to comment on their own times and histories while sharing in its sense of dread and fear.

Yeats's "The Second Coming" has remained so popular because it manages to put into words the existential horror of existing in a world where news reports show headlines describing unspeakable violence every day. It expresses a universal fear of change and disconnection, and it has become more relevant as time has gone on and technology and new forms of violence continue to disrupt old structures of order. It also manages to express the hope and possibility that can be implicit in these new structures and in new frames of mind.

Is the "rough beast" necessarily an evil thing?

The "rough beast" seems to be evil, but a closer read reveals that it could also be a very positive thing as well, leading to creation out of destruction. After all, Yeats never overtly says that the rough beast is a bad thing. He says that what is happening in the world in the present—the tides of violence, the destruction of innocence—are bad things, but they could be indicative of a death that will lead to rebirth. The world could be destroying itself in order to be reborn in Bethlehem, and all of the violence could be a tide that is really like the Biblical flood that destroyed the world (except for Noah and his ark) so it could be recreated and made better.

Yeats's lack of moral judgment in the poem is one of its most profound characteristics. Yeats did not believe that any civilizations were better than others, and in "A Vision," he wrote, "The historian talks of Greece as an advance of Persia, of Rome as something or other in advance of Greece... I upon the other hand, must think all civilizations equal at their best."

After all, the original coming of Christ must have seemed "monstrous and terrifying to those whose superstition it supersedes," wrote the critic Leonard Nathan. Christianity's rise did lead to the demise of ancient traditions and whole civilizations. Perhaps the "rough beast" will ultimately become the revered savior of a new world.

People are naturally resistant to change, but in a world that is a "widening gyre," a moving, cycling organism, change is inevitable.

The Second Coming Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Second Coming is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Comments on The Second Coming

"The Second Coming" is a poem by William Butler Yeats, written in 1919, several years after the end of World War I. It is named after the Christian "Second Coming," which is the Biblical prophecy that predicts Jesus's return to earth to reign...

The second coming, HELPPPPPPPP

The poem is written in a variant on iambic pentameter, in which each line is made up of five iambic feet, but the poem varies and riffs on this form, making its internal structure not entirely obvious. Since its publication, it has been referenced...

What are two mistakes that Hans made after he turned in his application

On the way home from giving his application, Hans saw men throwing bricks into the window of a Jewish clothing shop and writing “Jewish filth” on the door. He returned to the Nazi headquarters, broke the window with his fist, and said he could no...

Study Guide for The Second Coming

The Second Coming study guide contains a biography of William Butler Yeats, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About The Second Coming
• The Second Coming Summary
• The Second Coming Video
• Character List

Essays for The Second Coming

The Second Coming essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats.

• Manipulation of Language and the Dichotomies of Human Experiences
• Heaven’s Yeats: An Eroded Eschatology in "The Second Coming"

Lesson Plan for The Second Coming

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Second Coming
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Second Coming Bibliography