Historical Trauma and Prophetic Vision

Written in 1919, immediately after World War I, the poem reflects Yeats's belief that Western civilization was collapsing. The widening gyre represents a cyclical view of history where old systems disintegrate and new, potentially monstrous orders emerge.

Yeats draws on apocalyptic imagery from Christian eschatology, but subverts traditional expectations of divine redemption. Instead of a savior, a 'rough beast' approaches—suggesting that historical transformation might be violent, irrational, and fundamentally inhuman.

Poetic Technique of Prophetic Disruption

The poem's structure mirrors its content: traditional meter is disrupted, rhyme is unstable, and syntax becomes increasingly fragmented. Key technical elements include:

• Repetition of 'Surely' creates a sense of anxious anticipation • Shifting between concrete imagery and abstract proclamation • Use of capitalized concepts ('Second Coming', 'Spiritus Mundi') to give mythic weight to contemporary observations

William Butler Yeats

The Second Coming

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

Falconer's Lost Control

Metaphor of disconnection: the falcon represents human systems spinning out of control, unable to hear their original guiding force.

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

Spiritus Mundi Concept

Yeats's mystical term for a collective unconscious or universal soul from which archetypal images emerge.

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

Chimeric Beast Emerges

Hybrid creature symbolizes a monstrous new historical epoch: part human, part animal, totally alien.

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

Wind 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?

Apocalyptic Birth Metaphor

Christ's birth is reframed as a violent awakening that will spawn a destructive new force.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation