William Butler Yeats
(1865-1939)
Friends,
In the ten years that we have been doing poetry month all our activity has occurred within the month of April. I could wait to share Yeats Second Coming in April 2025 but there is something going on in our country that resonates with this poem. It seems better not to wait.
Yeats wrote this poem in 1919 - still in the shadow of WWI. Western Europe and the US had been traumatized by the savagery of that war. Ireland itself had been through very difficult times. Though some said the wars were over and that there would be a time of peace ahead. Instead, Yeats sensed that more and perhaps greater difficulties were to come.
So, when I recently returned to Yeats' Second Coming, I could not help but feel a connection to the anxiety created by an uncertain future in many parts of the 2024 world, the USA included. There is no comfort in this poem, no promise that everything will turn out for the best.
Our national politics is in flux. Just a few days ago we saw an attempted assassination of a presidential candidate. What will be next?
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?
Summary
This is a complex poem which seeks to tackle a complex aspect of experience. I poked around and found a summary and a commentary that can help understand what Yeats was saying (and what we ourselves may be experiencing).
The speaker describes a nightmarish scene: the falcon, turning in a widening “gyre” (spiral), cannot hear the falconer; “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”; anarchy is loosed upon the world; “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The best people, the speaker says, lack all conviction, but the worst “are full of passionate intensity". Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation; “Surely the Second Coming is at hand.” No sooner does he think of “the Second Coming,” then he is troubled by “a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi, or the collective spirit of mankind: somewhere in the desert, a giant sphinx (“A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun”) is moving, while the shadows of desert birds reel about it. The darkness drops again over the speaker’s sight, but he knows that the sphinx’s twenty centuries of “stony sleep” have been made a nightmare by the motions of “a rocking cradle.” And what “rough beast,” he wonders, “its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
Commentary
Because of its stunning, violent imagery, “The Second Coming” is one of Yeats’s most famous and most anthologized poems. It is also one of the most thematically obscure and difficult to understand. Structurally, the poem is quite simple—the first stanza describes the conditions present in the world (things falling apart, anarchy, etc.), and the second surmises from those conditions that a monstrous Second Coming is about to take place, not of the Jesus we first knew, but of a new messiah, a “rough beast,” the slouching sphinx rousing itself in the desert and lumbering toward Bethlehem.
“The Second Coming” was intended by Yeats to describe the current historical moment (the poem written in 1919 first appeared in 1921). Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation. The “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem is the symbol of this new age; the speaker’s vision of the rising sphinx is his vision of the character of the new world.
Worrying then and worrying now.
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