Poem Summary

Lines 1 to 4

The first line of “The Second Coming” presents the metaphor of a spinning gyre.
Gyres, generally, are circular or spiral forms — like vortexes or tornadoes. Gyres are
spindles or bobbins made of two cones that meet internally. The smallest point of each
cone enters the broad base of the other, so that when the end of the thread is tugged, it
will alternately unwrap from each direction. Everyday gyres are tools used to allow
the consistent feeding of thread into a sewing apparatus.

But Yeats’s gyre is vast enough to contain a falcon and a falconer — it is a gyre with
the dimensions of the world. What is more, its cycle is widening so greatly that the
falconer, who has trained his bird to return, is now unable to summon the bird, which
cannot hear the cry to return home. Again, the falcon and falconer are metaphors —
for encroaching distance and disorder — and so far “The Second Coming” is an
evasive and abstract poem. Then, the poem announces, baldly, what is happening:
“Things fall apart.” The fact that centers of order, control, and sense (which operate
like the falconer’s cry to the falcon), no longer function, but lose hold, signals an
ominous message of doom. That the disintegration of things at a vast scale should be
accompanied by a release of anarchy is, then, unsurprising. What is unexpected is that
anarchy is identified as “mere.” Is the anarchy no real threat? Is there something far
worse than anarchy whose presence dwarfs social chaos? While these questions are
unresolved, the qualification of anarchy as “mere” dampens the doom of the poem,
breaking up its message into something more complex than, say, familiar urgent
announcements, printed on placards, that warn “The end is near.”

Lines 5 to 8

In these lines, the poem delivers three amplifications of what it means for things to
fall apart. A tide red with blood is released and “loosed” over everything, suggesting
massive violent deaths, as in a war. Not merely water, this tide drowns bodies as well
as innocence itself — it washes away purity. In its wake, wise, good people are
reduced to self-doubt and uncertainty, while the worst of people become passionate
and, presumably, powerful.

Lines 9 to 13

The poem’s narrator now makes some guesses about what, exactly, is happening. He
first surmises that “some revelation” is here. A revelation is defined as something
revealed, but it is a word packed with suggestiveness, because mystical visions of the
divine plan for humanity, as seen and reported by people, have traditionally been
called revelations. In particular, the Christian God’s plan for the end of the world —
as reported by St. John of Patmos — is featured in the last book of the Bible, titled
“Revelation.” When the narrator then supposes that the “Second Coming” is here, he
seems to indicate even more strongly that he witnesses an end of the world like the
one described in the book of Revelation. (That scenario tells of the return of Christ to
the world, his judgement of all worldly beings, and his foundation of another order, in
which the just are saved and brought to join God, while the unjust are horrifically
destroyed.) But the narrator is then prompted into a vision of his own. His sight
becomes “troubled” by an Aimage out of “Spiritus Mundi” — a Latin term that
means “the spirit of the world.”

Yeats and many of his contemporaries wondered about the existence of a

consciousness that was not exactly a god, but that was a repository and source for the
myths and imaginations of everyone in the world. Like a storehouse of symbols,
“Spiritus Mundi” was seen as a parallel, dreamworld accessible to everyone alive. It
was not considered to be a realm for Christians only, so the fact that the narrator’s
vision is a projection from “Spiritus Mundi” means that its audience will be broader
than that of the book of Revelation, and that the vision will be more widely relevant
and more universally, mystically binding even than a vision of the second coming of
Christ. By announcing his role as visionary, the narrator places himself in the tradition
of storytellers who reveal superhuman understandings of fate.

Lines 14 to 17

In the narrator’s vision, an Egyptian sphinx (a mythic creature that is half man, half
lion) stirs in the middle of a desert, while its motion startles nearby birds into angry
flight. The personality of this creature is sinister — it is without pity, and its stare is
“blank.” Certainly, this vision evokes the enormous, ancient statue of a sphinx at Gila,
near Cairo, Egypt. The presence of a sphinx suggests that the narrator’s ethereal
vision comes from a concrete place even more ancient than Christianity, and more
enormous than the Western world.

Lines 18 to 22

Although the narrator has described a frightening and menacing creature, it is not until
the end of the vision that darkness returns. But from the vision’s insight, he has
learned something: a rocking cradle (signifying Christ) has caused two thousand years
of sleep, which is now at the point of night-mare. At this era’s end, everything will
change, awakening a “rough beast” who, apparently due at precisely this moment, is
about to be born in Bethlehem. Since this town was also the birthplace of Christ, we
are again reminded of the Second Coming of Christ prophesied in the Bible’s book of
Revelation. But as the poetic vision was of a sun beast — the sphinx — we, along
with the narrator, remain unsure what kind of creature is arriving. What is clear is that
something is coming, that it is demanded by the times, that its arrival will change
everything, and that it will appear amid disorder and destruction. About to be born is
an incarnation of ruin.

Themes

Apocalypse

Although the term apocalypse is often used to mean disaster, its Greek root signifies
revelation. The last book of the Christian Bible, sometimes called the Apocalypse, or
Revelation, is so named because it reveals St. John of Patmos’s vision of the end of
the world as we know it. That his vision is of enormous upheaval — of a world
shaken by storm and attacked by locusts before the righteous are saved and the sinners
destroyed — is part of the reason the word apocalypse has come to be synonymous
with catastrophe. But in that book, the ultimate spirit of Judgement Day is as hopeful
as it is furious: it is a vision of final holy justice. Believers in the fate it details could
console themselves with the Tate of an eventual day of reckoning. Whatever injustices
took place in their lifetimes, they could know that, in the end, all would be put right.

Like the last book of the Christian Bible, and partially in reference to that narrative,
Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is also an apocalypse, in both senses of the word. The
idea that the year 2,000 will conclude a divine cycle of history links such an ending to
the birth of Christ at year zero; mean-while, the “rough beast” that Yeats imagines is
about to be born is moving toward Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ. In these ways,
“The Second Coming” evokes the Bible’s book of Revelation. The remainder of the
poem’s imagery, however, points to a mythic figure more ancient than Christ — the
Egyptian sphinx, and the portents of world change are not the same as those in
Revelation. This apocalypse, therefore, is unique to Yeats’s vision. That it is a form of
apocalypse is, nonetheless, unambiguous, first because its central episode is a divine
vision that comes from beyond history to trouble the sight of the narrator, and also
because the vision is of disaster. The question begged by the poem concerning the
poet’s vision is whether the change brought by the “rough beast” is a good one. Is this
a Tate of the overthrow of a good order or a bad one? Is the drowned innocence true,
or is it the relic of a world that needed to be cleansed, however violently? While the
poem’s tone is ominous and its figures are frightening, the fact that it is an apocalypse
— and is, therefore, a type of narrative that often describes righteous, final violence
— makes the poem’s terms fundamentally uncertain. The poet’s vision asserts that
what counts as dark, or innocent, and who is regarded as the best, or the worst, is
about to change — and may even be reversed. He envisions a heavy beast that will
turn upside down not just the world, but its values as well.

Order and Disorder

The main theme of “The Second Coming” is of a flood of disorder that drowns
existing world order. One central image that conveys this theme is the falcon, a bird
that flies in ever-widening circles away from its trainer, but that is meant to return
when called back. In “The Second Coming,” the bird can no longer hear the falconer’s
cry. Taken as a metaphor for the general disorder the poem describes, the bird loosed
from its return suggests a slackening of communication and a widening of distance
between he who controls and he who is controlled, signifying the undoing of all.

The initial image in the poem, that of the gyre (pronounced with a hard “g”), can be
read as the geometry of the falcon’s cyclic flight. However, readers familiar with
other of Yeats’s poems and, particularly, with his cosmogony (as put forth in A
Vision), will recognize the gyre as the hourglass shape that Yeats considers as
representative of all life. From the double cone of the gyre, thread spins from just one
place at any given moment, but that place always contains within it an opposite
influence (just as the gyre-shaped bobbin is composed of two interpenetrating cones,
with the tip of one reaching to the broad base of the other cone). For Yeats, this
dynamic geometry is the shape of history, which he sees as moving in two-thousand-
year increments between one extreme, where history will favor utter personal
individuality (and incarnation), and another, where history will endorse interpersonal
unity (and disincarnation). Extending this cycle to provide understandings of human
personality, Yeats makes his gyre into a symbol for the workings of all of life, which
rotates from one extreme to the other, but which always contains the opposite extreme
within whichever one is manifest. This cyclic view of history differs from one, such
as that of Christianity, that views time as linear — moving to a unique future from a
particular point in the past; in this sense alone, Yeats’s vision of the end of the world
differs from a Christian view. During the early twentieth century, the poet-visionary
saw total disorder trampling order. But this has happened before, and it will happen
again. Indeed, since Yeats’s account of history and the alternation between opposite
kinds of civilization considers this process to be inevitable — the result of the hidden
cycle coming forth to balance the cycle in which it was suppressed — witnessing the
“blood-dimmed tide” of disorder may even be done dispassionately.

Topics for Further Study

• Explain how the feeling of “The Second Coming” is established with its
sounds. What are the effects of alliteration (as in “darkness drops”), word
repetition (“turning,” “loosed,” “surely”) and assonance (as in “gaze blank”)?
Read the poem aloud, then listen closely as someone else reads it aloud. How
is the meaning of the words echoed or contradicted by the rhythm of the
poem?
• Compare Yeats’s vision of revolution to political revolutions of the twentieth
century. Does this spiritual, symbolic rendition of cataclysmic change have
bearing on historical shifts?
• Reflect on how the world would look if its order were thoroughly shaken.
What changes would need to occur if it were to become a world turned upside
down or brought to an entirely new state? Compare your vision of upheaval to
those of a religion with which you are familiar.

Style

At first, “The Second Coming” sounds and looks like an early example of free verse,
which is poetry unorganized by any strict pattern of rhyme or rhythm. Yeats was,
however, no proponent of free verse, which he considered “too personal and original”
for him; “I must choose a traditional stanza,” he decided (as noted in Tindall’s
William Butler Yeats). Just so, on closer inspection, “The Second Coming” is like
strictly rhymed and metered verse that is being actively troubled and undone by its
own content. The style of the poem supports and echoes its topic. It is not so much
free verse as verse that is being forced into a more chaotic form, and, just as in the
poem, “the center cannot hold.” The anchoring meter of the poem is iambic
pentameter, which consists of lines with five feet, each of which contains two
syllables, first an unaccented one, and then an accented syllable (the effect is ta-TA,
like in the word “convey”). But the poem contains few lines where iambic pentameter
is solid and clear, like it is in “The falcon cannot hear the falconer,” and “The
darkness drops again but now I know.” Such solid sound patterns exist in the poem,
but they are surrounded by exceptions. The poem opens, for example, with a line of
only four strong stresses; and in the middle and last lines of that first stanza, the lines:
“The ceremony of innocence is drowned,” and “Are full of passionate intensity”
foreshorten the rhythm other lines have established. The effect of these
inconsistencies echoes the poem’s theme of order and center lost, but this effect is all
the stronger for the presence of a metrical example of the order that is on its way out.
Similarly, the rhymes in “The Second Coming” are slight, when remarkable at all, and
are eventually lost. While the first two, and second two lines of the first stanza set up
a light aabb rhyme pattern, the rhyme is of the end consonants only, rather than of the
vowels and end consonants (like in lake and rake). Even this flavor of rhyme, which is
called half-rhyme, then dissolves by the end of the stanza. Given this diminishment, it
is surprising to see the second stanza begin with two virtually identical lines that
begin and conclude with identical words, “Surely,” and “is at hand” (although the
repetition does point to the significance of the event). But again, this tight repetition
— which we have also seen with the “is loosed” of the first stanza — does not remain.
In Yeats’s day, many poets had made the abandonment of metric and rhyme
conventions a part of their poetry for the new century. In every era, poets have
composed deeply awkward phrases in an effort to make their verse conform to such
conventions. Yeats, however, was a perfectionist and an able user of conventional
forms, who was capable of composing even and rhymed metrical lines, such as these
in “The Spur” (1938):

You think it terrible that lust and rage

Should dance attention upon my old age;
They were not such a plague when I was young;
What else have I to spur me into song?

We can take seriously, then, his decision in “The Second Coming” to swing his verse
in and out of such patterns, and we can also judge his word repetitions as significant
— they do not appear for lack of the poet’s vocabulary. The emphasis of the sound
and rhythm of this poem redouble its identification of destined disorder.