The Second Coming

Summary

The Second Coming is a twenty-two-line poem in two verse paragraphs in which Yeats imagines the end of the Christian era and the birth of something terrible to replace it. He wrote it in January 1919, in the months after the First World War, with the Russian Revolution and its violence recent and Ireland moving toward its own war of independence. It appeared in The Dial in November 1920 and in his collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer, printed by his sisters' Cuala Press. The first paragraph is a picture of collapse. A falcon wheels in a widening gyre until it can no longer hear the falconer; things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. A blood-dimmed tide drowns the ceremony of innocence. The paragraph ends with the most quoted diagnosis in the poem: the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. The second paragraph turns from description to prophecy. Surely, the speaker says twice, some revelation is at hand, surely the Second Coming. But the words call up not Christ but a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi, Yeats's term for a common storehouse of images: in a desert, a shape with a lion's body and a man's head, its gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, moving its slow thighs while indignant desert birds wheel above. Darkness falls again, and the speaker now knows that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. The poem ends with a question: what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Behind the poem lies Yeats's private system, later set out in A Vision (1925), in which history moves in cycles of about two thousand years, pictured as interlocking gyres; the Nativity began one age and its end is near. Readers need not accept the system to feel the poem's force. Its opening lines have become standard language for describing political breakdown, and phrases from it have supplied titles to many later books.

Top Lessons

• Conviction and its counterfeits

  The line about the best lacking conviction and the worst being full of passionate intensity names a danger in any age of crisis: good people grow hesitant while the violent grow certain. The poem does not say intensity is evil in itself, but that conviction severed from goodness becomes destructive and goodness without conviction becomes helpless.

• A counterfeit second coming

  The title promises Christ's return in glory, but the vision delivers its opposite: a pitiless beast slouching toward the town of the Nativity. Yeats borrows the Christian pattern of a sacred birth opening a new age and inverts it, so that the reader feels both the expectation and the horror.

• Images that outlive their system

  Yeats built the poem on his private theory of historical gyres, yet most readers know nothing of that theory and still find the poem exact. Strong images such as the falcon beyond hearing and the drowned ceremony of innocence carry meaning beyond the scheme that produced them.

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