The Second Coming

The speaker of “The Second Coming” is an unnamed first-person narrator who is observing the world around him and speculating on what’s to come; the perspective is often attributed to Yeats himself. The poem is in blank verse and consists of two stanzas and 22 lines, the second stanza being longer than the first. The meter loosely follows iambic pentameter, with alternating stressed and unstressed syllables and roughly 10 syllables per line.

In the first stanza Yeats uses imagery to set the stage. A falcon flying in a wider and wider circle with no direction from his master introduces a sense of aimlessness. Yeats builds this feeling with a diacope of the word “turning,” repeating it twice in the first line to create a dizzying effect. The falcon symbolizes the wayward nature of the speaker’s society: People have lost their direction and moral compass, and they no longer listen to their master, the falconer, who may be a metaphor for a moral authority. Additionally, these two lines contain a consonance of the heavy “n” sound in the words “turning,” “widening,” “falcon,” “cannot,” and “falconer” (Lines 1-2).

Following the first two lines, the poem quickly lists the terrible things happening in the world. First, anarchy is “loosed upon the world” (Line 4), which causes the “blood-dimmed tide” (Line 5). The speaker uses the word “loosed” in both lines to imply that each occurrence is begetting another. The blood likely refers to World War I, which concluded mere months before Yeats penned this poem. Around the same time, Yeats’s pregnant wife was ill with the Spanish flu that killed millions. Given so much death, the casualties of war and sickness would have seemed a “blood-dimmed tide.”

The speaker attacks society further in Lines 5-6 by saying that death and destruction have “drowned” the “ceremony of innocence.” He implies there never was true innocence, but the dark times have wiped away the suggestion of innocence that once existed. Lines 5 and 6 establish a rhythm through the use of consonance, repeating the “d” sound in the words “blood-dimmed,” “tide,” “loosed” and “drowned,” and the soft “c” sound in “ceremony” and “innocence.”

In the last two lines of the first stanza, the speaker separates society into the good and the bad: the “best” and the “worst.” Yeats intentionally doesn’t use the word “good,” as he means to imply that these are the slightly better people in a bad lot; they are good but do not stand up for their moral standards. The bad, however, are passionate and active. This stanza shapes the speaker’s world: blood and death are everywhere, the evil do as they please, and anyone with good intentions stays quiet.

Now that the speaker has depicted his present day for the reader, he speculates on why these things are happening. He thinks a “revelation” is going to occur. Revelation, meaning something revealed, alludes to the Book of Revelation in the Bible, wherein John prophesies the apocalypse and the Second Coming of Jesus.

The speaker directly addresses the Second Coming in Lines 10 and 11. Yeats uses symploce with the repetition of “surely” at the beginning of both lines and the repetition of “at hand” at the end of both lines. This device establishes a rhythm and emphasizes that the poem is concluding. The move from vague “some revelation” (Line 9) to specific “the Second Coming” (Line 10) supports the idea that the speaker is brainstorming why the world is in chaos before settling on the theory of the Second Coming.

Just as the speaker settles his theory, he sees a vision from “Spiritus Mundi.” Spiritus Mundi, according to Yeats, is “a universal memory and a ‘muse’ of sorts that provides inspiration to the poet or writer.” It is the “collective unconscious” that informs the work of artists. The Spiritus Mundi vision is of a lion with a man’s head. Yeats alludes to the Bible again here, as beasts like this appear in the Book of Revelations as well. One such beast is a leopard with the feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion (Rev. 13:2), which will help usher in the apocalypse, as does the beast in Yeats’s poem.

Yeats’s beast resembles a sphinx, a creature most often seen in ancient Egyptian iconography. The speaker also recalls Egypt by noting the sphinx’s desert environment, a connection played up by the sphinx’s expression: “pitiless as the sun” (Line 15). Though the sphinx has a human head, it seems inhuman and “blank,” and it moves in no particular hurry, with desert birds circling around it. This image creates tension, as the sphinx moves slowly toward an unknown end. The circling birds mimic the circling falcon from the first stanza, and Yeats uses consonance again with the “d” sound in “indignant dessert birds” (Line 17).

As the speaker’s vision ends, he realizes that the calm period of the last 20 centuries, likely a reference to the first coming of Christ, is disrupted to “nightmare by a rocking cradle” (Line 20). Yeats uses infant imagery to recall innocence, the birth of Jesus, and the birth of the monster. During Christ’s reign in that first 20 centuries, the innocent slept soundly, a “stony sleep,” but now the cradle rocks, and the innocent are suddenly in a nightmare. These lines speak to the corruption of Europe and the evil that the speaker predicts. These lines also use alliteration: “darkness drops” and “centuries” of “stony sleep” (Lines 18-19).

Yeats ends the poem with a question, asking what the rough beast is as it moves toward Bethlehem. The question implies that even the speaker doesn’t know the end result of the Second Coming, though it seems clear that it isn’t the return of Jesus, as in the Christian tradition. Instead, Yeats juxtaposes the beast and Jesus by sending the beast to Jesus’s birthplace to be born. Where once the innocent baby was born to a virgin, now a “rough beast” will be born. It’s interesting that Yeats seems to use Egyptian imagery, since Jesus and his parents fled to Egypt after his birth.

While the poem’s actual antagonist is unclear, it is clear that the speaker is anticipating an even darker time than the one he described in the first stanza—a time when a beast reigns instead of Jesus. Rather than a strict religious reading, Yeats likely refers to an age of violence and evil overcoming an age of innocence.