The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats (1919)

Even if you aren’t familiar with W.B. Yeats, I can almost guarantee that you will recognize many of the phrases in this poem—other artists have culled them steadily throughout the hundred years since its publication. Even if the full meaning is confusing, the imagery and rhythm here makes this oft-anthologized piece well worth the read.

So, this isn’t a happy Easter poem. In fact, it’s mega-dark. Though written right after World War I, that first stanza unfortunately describes themes absolutely applicable to today, as if we haven’t bothered to learn from history. Yeats was an Irish poet, so beyond WWI, he was also living through all the crap that was going on in Ireland during that time. That first stanza embodies the chaos and uncertainty of war and politics. The second stanza offers a ray of hope before completely crushing it.

This Easter Sunday, you probably have plenty of feel-goods on your feed, so here I’m offering some balance! After all, why have hope when you could be hopeless?

Short Stuff:

• Yeats was in a secret society! That did magic!
• Although he typically wrote within a fairly regimented structure and meter, this poem is pretty darn close to free-verse.
• A gyre is a vortex-type thing, and it has something to do with whatever theory Yeats came up with about life during his mystical studies.

Topics

violence, nihilism, prophecy

---

The Second Coming

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?

–William Butler Yeats