The Second Coming

A Explication of a Poem by W.B. Yeats

Australian soldiers visit the Pyramids and the Sphinx during leave in 1918. Wikimedia Commons

The Second Coming

By: W.B. Yeats

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?

Explication:

The poet sees the world changing, a new epoch is upon her. It is after the First World War, and Europe, i.e. Christendom, is in turmoil. The people have strayed from their God. The world has fallen apart. Their foundation is gone. All is anarchy. None are innocent, all are guilty, in this carnage, drowned in blood and death, everywhere. Those who in word espouse the “best” ideals do not act. And those who espouse the “worst” are first, and most active.

Something is going to be revealed! Is it the Second Coming? The poet receives a vision from the world spirit that troubles him. A sphinx, fierce and pitiless, moving slowly through the world, encircled by birds to gorge on the flesh of the dead. This is not the Second Coming, this is something else. Something that has laid in wait since Christ walked the earth. A “rough beast” that is coming into the world, that will usurp Christendom. By its awakening the nightmare of the First World War ensued. How long will the beast roam? The poet warns the world on the threshold of the next world war.

What does this poem speak to you?