The Second Coming

Yeats believed in the cyclical nature of the world, an interest that appeared thematically in his poems concerning life, death, and the repetition of history. In particular, he thought history cycled through a pattern every 2,000 years. His beliefs appear in the wording of “The Second Coming” and in his letter to a friend, in which he suggested that the poem predicted the Nazis’ rise to power. While Yeats didn’t specifically know that another world war was coming, he felt that the cycle was perpetuating and would culminate in some dark disaster.

Yeats first suggests the beginning of a cycle in the poem’s first few lines, with a falcon circling like a gyre. A gyre is a kind of vortex, often the swirling of an ocean tide. Yeats uses the gyre image to describe several spiritual phenomena that he and Georgie Hyde-Lees saw and experienced, and he uses it in reference to the nature of history in his book, A Vision:

Then the gyre develops a new coherence in the external scene; and violent men, each master of some generalization, arise one after another: Napoleon, a man of the 20th Phase in the historical 21st […] typical of all. (Yeats, W. B. A Vision. Palgrave Macmillan, 1962.)

When we consider that the gyre is a vortex, the falcon is “circling” it much like an object circling a drain. The falcon, a symbol for Yeats’s contemporary society, is thus about to be pulled into the gyre. Using this image, Yeats shows that society is about to enter a new phase of history.

The next few lines (4-8) present what Yeats recognizes as precursors to the cycle: Violence, evil, and anarchy prevail while the “good” stay silent. The lack of moral fortitude leads Yeats to his conclusion at the beginning of the next stanza: “Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand” (Lines 9-10). In seeing the signs of devolution, Yeats predicts a new cycle in history, which he feels his vision of a sphinx from the spirit world confirms. That the sphinx, an ancient symbol, rises from the sands of the desert to be reborn supports the idea that history is repeating itself.

Yeats admits he doesn’t know what the coming phase will bring, but after 20 centuries of sleep, “its [the beast’s] hour [has] come” (Line 21), meaning this terrible thing was bound to happen at this time, given the 2,000-year cycle of history. Yeats left the details intentionally vague, believing that the poem would continue to relate to different historical moments.