The Second Coming analysis

The first stanza describes a world whose centre cannot hold: authority, innocence, and conviction collapse while anarchy spreads.

The expected Christian revelation becomes a desert vision of a hybrid rough beast moving toward Bethlehem.^[2]

The gyre represents Yeats’s cyclical theory of history. Its widening motion suggests an era expanding beyond the authority that once contained it.^[3]

The poem reverses the Second Coming: instead of a savior, an unnamed force approaches. Its ambiguity allows later readers to apply the image to different crises.^[2]

• Historical cycles

  The widening gyre catches a cycle at the point where its centre can no longer contain released forces.

• Collapse of authority

  Falcon and falconer lose contact, while the best lack conviction.

• Reversed revelation

  And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

  Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  Birth becomes ominous rather than redemptive.

The poem has two stanzas, eight lines followed by fourteen. Its second stanza is sonnet-like in length but not conventionally ordered.

Irregular blank verse, enjambment, and partial rhyme make formal instability echo the collapsing order.^[3]

• Symbolism

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The gyre symbolizes cyclical history moving toward violent transition.

• Extended metaphor

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

  The lost bird becomes an image of failed communication and authority.

• Allusion and inversion

  Surely the Second Coming is at hand;

  Christian prophecy is invoked and then darkly overturned.

Yeats wrote the poem in January 1919 amid the aftermath of World War I, unrest in Ireland, and the influenza pandemic. It appeared in The Dial in November 1920.

The poem draws on Yeats’s mystical system of interlocking gyres and combines biblical, occult, and mythic language.^[2]

• “The poem reveals, in other words, an order, a twisted logic behind the apparent disorder of the contemporary world”

• “the gyre is an image Yeats uses to symbolize grand, sweeping historical movements as a kind of spiral”

1. University College Cork CELT
2. Adrian Paterson, Moore Institute, University of Galway
3. LitCharts
4. University College Cork CELT