The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats

Full Text

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?

Overview

Yeats portrays a world in collapse and imagines a terrifying new epoch, symbolized by a sphinx-like beast.

Line-by-Line Analysis

Lines 1-8

The falcon and falconer image suggests breakdown of control; chaos overwhelms innocence.

Lines 9-22

The speaker foresees not salvation but a monstrous birth, replacing the old religious order.

Themes

• Apocalypse
• Chaos
• Cycle of history
• Spiritual crisis
• Violence

Literary Devices

Symbolism

gyre — Represents Yeats’s theory of historical cycles.

Imagery

lion body and the head of a man — Creates a vivid, ominous vision.

Historical Context

Written after World War I and during the Irish War of Independence, reflecting cultural and political upheaval.