# The Second Coming analysis

The Second Coming — William Butler Yeats (1920)

Yeats turns a falcon’s lost command and a sphinx-like beast into a vision of civilization entering a terrifying new cycle.

Full text from [The Second Coming](https://celt.ucc.ie/published/E910001-066.html). Public domain in the US (First published in The Dial in 1920, before the US public-domain cutoff.).

## Summary

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

```
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
```

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

## Meaning and interpretation

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

```
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
```

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]

## Themes

### 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.

## Form and meter

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]

## Literary devices

### 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.

## Historical context

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]

## What critics say

> “The poem reveals, in other words, an order, a twisted logic behind the apparent disorder of the contemporary world”
>
> — Adrian Paterson, [Moore Institute, University of Galway](https://mooreinstitute.ie/2020/12/18/9809/)

> “the gyre is an image Yeats uses to symbolize grand, sweeping historical movements as a kind of spiral”
>
> — [LitCharts](https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-butler-yeats/the-second-coming)

## Common questions

### What is the main meaning?

Yeats presents a civilization losing its centre as one historical cycle ends and a frightening new force emerges.

### What does the gyre mean?

It is a spiral image for Yeats’s theory of recurring historical cycles.

### What is the rough beast?

It is an intentionally ambiguous hybrid representing a brutal new historical force or era.

## References

- [University College Cork CELT](https://celt.ucc.ie/published/E910001-066.html)

- [Adrian Paterson, Moore Institute, University of Galway](https://mooreinstitute.ie/2020/12/18/9809/)

- [LitCharts](https://www.litcharts.com/poetry/william-butler-yeats/the-second-coming)

- [University College Cork CELT](https://celt.ucc.ie/published/E910001-066.html)

## Open the editor

Write with this poem’s open form in the editor: https://lyriic.com/write