Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" in 1920, while the world was at once recovering from the carnage of World War I and warily monitoring the rise of fascism and communism.
The poem is a product of Yeats’ idiosyncratic spiritual world view, which included both Christian and occult influences. It describes what he believed to be the inevitable fall of Western Europe at the hands of a new power that would come from Africa (Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, bases its title and premise on this aspect of the poem, refuting Yeats’ view of African civilization) (1457). A close reading of “The Second Coming” shows how Yeats describes this looming era, a period of chaotic destruction that sets the scene for a new order that is unstoppable in its march towards domination.
The first stanza of “The Second Coming” depicts a mass destruction of civilization. It begins with the image of a falcon, unable to hear its master’s commands, careening out of control like a heavenly body cast out of orbit:
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,
Once that center of control disappears, the world collapses into disorder. The falcon, its animal instincts winning over its obedience to rational direction, represents the worst in human nature. Having cast off the chains of reason, it ushers in a tidal wave of uncontrollable, indiscriminate violence:
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
Soon, the world is turned upside down, as are the actors in this human drama:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Those who had been considered conscientious now find their will to act paralyzed, while those who wish to harm gain momentum through their strong desires. Civilization has been razed to the ground, and the world is now ready for its new master.
The last stanzas shift the scene from wet to dry, cold flood to burning sands. We are now in a desolate landscape, “somewhere in the sands of the desert.” A question remains: might not this be a long-awaited event?
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
However, the revelation yields a bleak future:
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.
This is a powerful image: an intelligent being of extraordinary strength but devoid of emotion, slowly but relentlessly walking towards its destiny. Woken by the sounds of destruction after “twenty centuries of stony sleep,” it stands and begins to walk “towards Bethlehem to be born,” a nightmarish Messiah whose time “has come round at last.”
Yeats, gazing into history between the horrific memories of the first World War and the threat of new totaliarian regimes, describes in “The Second Coming” what he believed might be the ultimate fate of Western European society. Weakened from war and oppression, Europe would collapse and give way to a new world power that would rise out from the desert sands.
Work Cited
The version and commentary of the poem referenced for this article is on pages 1457 ff., in: Mack, Maynard, et al (eds.). The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. New York: Norton, 1997. Pages 2756-2784. However, Yeats’ work is in the public domain, and free electronic editions are available from Project Gutenberg.
