English 101: English Literature

In this video, we'll discuss Irish poet W.B. Yeats' most famous poem, 'The Second Coming.' Written after the devastation of World War I, it uses a religious metaphor to capture a Europe in chaos and on the brink of change.

The Second Coming - The Poem

In many ways, poet W.B. Yeats is viewed as the big granddaddy of Modernism. He's sort of like the progenitor of it all, in a way. He's of an older generation than many of the people we think of as Modernist poets, but he was extremely influential to them. He's older - again, kind of big granddaddy figure. Ezra Pound actually stayed with him for a few winters in a cottage in southeast England - they were hanging out, writing poetry, fighting over who left dishes in the sink.

And this poem in particular, 'The Second Coming,' is important not only as a work of Modernist poetry but also as a work that directly comments on the social condition post-World War I that spurred the development of Modernist poetry. It's kind of two-fold significant.

It's published in 1920, which is in the latter part of Yeats' career - he dies in 1939. So he's getting to be kind of an old dude by this point. World War I lasted from 1914-1918. It was notable for being unexpectedly violent and destructive because old methods of waging war, like trenches, were combined with new technology, like better guns, that produced battles that went nowhere and killed everyone.

As you might notice in the title, 'The Second Coming' is an overtly religious reference - you can't hear that term without thinking of the Second Coming of Christ. (I'm a lifelong lapsed Episcopalian and I still hear that. Maybe you don't.) But that's what Yeats is going for - an immediate Jesus reference, essentially.

So what's Yeats doing with this kind of religious language, and how does it relate to World War I? That's what we're going to look into. First we're going to take a look at the poem. It's short and seems kind of blasphemous (no pun intended...) to split it into pieces, so we're going to just read the whole thing out:

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; a waste of desert sand;

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

Wind 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?

Where to start?

The Widening Gyre

First of all, what is this widening gyre that Yeats discusses in the opening line? This refers to Yeats' admittedly very weird philosophy of how history works. You know how we usually picture history as a timeline? You might even have one for yourself. Mine begins at my birthday and has hash marks at graduation, when I got my car, and when I first saw Lord of the Rings - or how the timeline for A.D. (or C.E. for 'common era') begins at the birth of Jesus - Year 0.

Yeats had a much weirder model for the progression of history. Basically, he envisions it as two really big cone-shaped structures that are facing opposite ways in space, overlapping so that the nose of one rests in the center of the mouth of the other.

A 'gyre' is a path that you'd make if you traveled on the cone in a spiraling-outward way. So 'Turning and turning on the widening gyre' is the idea that as history progresses, we're going round and round and the circling is getting wider and wider. I can practically see you sitting there, banging your head at the computer, saying 'Why does this matter?'

It matters because Yeats had this idea that 1920, or post-World War I in general, was just about the time when they were transitioning from the outer gyre to the inner gyre - so we're about to turn around and start going back the other way to the narrow point of the second one that's in the wide mouth of the first one.

First Stanza Analysis: A New, Chaotic Age

It's basically just a giant metaphor for 'stuff is changing' - the character of the next age is going to be different than this past one. It's worth keeping in mind that every generation thinks the world is going to hell in a handbasket. You've probably heard a ton of studies that prove that today's college students don't have any empathy, no attention span, and all this stuff. And the Internet is ruining the world, and we're all going to be robots!

People have thought the world was going to be ruined forever - we're not the first. Yeats was not the first or the last. The Modernists writing at that time really thought that something big was happening post-World War I in terms of the character of the age and the character of the time.

The gyre model implies, in the way that it widens and then collapses in onto the point and goes the other way on the other cone, that there's a certain amount of increasing chaos - things get looser and looser until it collapses back down.

So we get the next line ('the falcon cannot hear the falconer'), and we realize that technically, that first description might have been describing the bird's path - this falcon flying in this widening circle - but the metaphor still works. The world is out of control. The falcon and falconer image adds to the sense that communication is totally hampered by the widening of the gyre. The falconer's over here, the falcon's over there, and the falcon's totally going to get loose - things are going to get away from us - loose falcons flying everywhere - crazy times, chaos, widening gyre - that's what that all means.

We get to the next bit and see 'Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold' - that really reinforces this. The gyre grows too wide to be comprehended and confined, and there's no sense of where the center is anymore. If 'things fall apart' sounds familiar, that's because it's the title of a famous book you may have had to read in school called Things Fall Apart by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It focuses on the changes experienced by the Igbo people as colonists and missionaries came into their world, so it's used to signal a similar type of change that Yeats is getting at in his poem as well.

The repetition of 'loosed' in the next two lines ('mere anarchy is loosed' and 'The blood-dimmed tide is loosed') furthers this idea that we're flinging things around - things are getting far apart and aren't bound together anymore. It also a little bit connotes the releasing of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - they're loosed onto the world - as described in Revelation (that book in the Bible that describes the Second Coming - again, lapsed Episcopalian - I know this stuff, kind of).

In any event, it's bad. The loosing is bad, clearly. All these images are super violent, dark, and warlike in a way, and that makes sense both in this World War I context and in the Revelation context because stuff gets bad in that part of the Bible (I hear).

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

This further emphasizes that the world is on its head. There's a reversal going on - maybe the people that we see as the best are waffling around and don't know what to do, and the people we see as the worst have gained momentum - they're the pointy bit on the end of the new gyre that's going that way.

Second Stanza Analysis: The Second Coming

Then at the beginning of the next stanza, we get to the title of the poem, so it must be a good part.

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

So he's saying that all of this signals that something big must be coming, some 'revelation,' and then he specifies that it's the 'Second Coming,' but this seems to bother him. That Latin term, 'Spiritus Mundi,' that comes in there is Latin for 'the soul of the world.' Yeats is using it to mean sort of a communal understanding of knowledge. As I told you, he had all these hocus pocus ideas about history and society and whatnot - this is just another one of them.

So he's saying that when he declares this 'revelation' to be the 'Second Coming,' he gets a troubling 'vast image' seemingly from 'the soul of the world' - the 'Spiritus Mundi' - that troubles his sight. In the next few lines, he goes on to describe this vision. He describes a wasteland desert with this sphinx-like creature living in it. He says:

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

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

This is a really apocalyptic-seeming vision. We're also hearkening back to Egypt with the sphinx and the desert birds - it kind of is representing a world that is very different from our current one and also one that's in the past and pre-First Coming of Jesus, which I think might be important as well. We're emphasizing this gyre two-way motion - that we might be going back to something that was before as we go forward. He goes on:

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?

And now we get really explicit references to the birth of Jesus - the city of Bethlehem, the rocking cradle - but Jesus isn't going to be born again - that's not Yeats' vision of what 'the Second Coming' is going to look like. It's going be some unfamiliar creature - some 'rough beast' - that heralds the start of the new age. And what a way to describe it: 'Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.' It's such a sharp image - this shadowy dark creature not walking, but slouching towards the birthplace of Jesus - kind of slinking along. It's moving in a totally alien way - I think that's the importance of 'slouching' there. It's not walking or running or doing anything we might recognize as a way that a creature moves.

The Poem's Meaning

And that's the poem. That's the end of the poem. So what has Yeats really said?

The world is changing. Because of the way change happens (we move from the widening outer gyre to the tip of the inner gyre that then goes back the other way), it seems chaotic and uncontrolled. Things seem to be falling apart. Certainly something must be coming along to fix it - something that we might think is the Second Coming of Christ because we have all this apocalyptic stuff happening, which is supposed to herald the Second Coming.

But if we think the herald of the new age is going to be something familiar, we're sorely mistaken - that's what Yeats is saying. The future is going to look different because it is different, and it will seem menacing because it's different and utterly unfamiliar.

So despite its title, it's not really about the Second Coming of Christ - it's about how apocalyptic it feels to live in a world in a state of flux. So why use the religious metaphor? Why does he do it?

Trade secret here: I've been constructing these lessons to appeal to you by reading a book called Made to Stick, which is basically about how to structure an argument so it will stick and so that you will remember what I say. One of the tactics it advocates is to use a 'schema' to help explain a point. A schema is basically something that your audience is already familiar with that can be related to what you're trying to explain.

Let's say that you already know how to dance (which might be a big assumption, depending on the person...) and then I tell you that learning to drive a manual transmission car is a lot like dancing - you have to react to your current circumstances and perform a series of moves in response. I'm relying on your schema of dancing to teach you about driving. What's the benefit of using a schema? You can usually teach something much more efficiently than if you had to do it from scratch.

Yeats is relying on the reader's schema of Christianity to communicate his anxiety about the unfamiliar world. All that bad stuff that he's describing in the first stanza - things falling apart and all that stuff - sounds a lot like what's supposed to happen before the Second Coming as described in Revelation.

So in the next stanza, he references that schema - he calls it up and says explicitly 'Second Coming.' But even in its introduction, he already reveals that he might be going to undermine this point later on - the 'Surely' in 'Surely the Second Coming is at hand' seems a bit disingenuous. Maybe it's not so surely the Second Coming is at hand.

So we might be expecting something positive to be coming, but Yeats undermines that and shows us instead that something weird and potentially devastating is coming. Using this model of Christianity for the schema, he sets up this expectation and then violates it, showing us where the situation he's describing differs from the one that you might be familiar with from the Bible and from Christianity.

And this takes us on a greater journey of discovery, and it cements his message more firmly in our heads than if he just said 'Things are different and weird!', which would not be poetry. Because if you think about it, communicating sharply, efficiently, and poignantly (by using images like these wheeling birds, the slouching toward Bethlehem, and by using schemas like the Second Coming) is what makes poetry poetry. I could just write something, but if I make it into a poem, I'm doing things that are going to be more efficient because poems are short and don't have a lot of space. I'm trying to make every word count, and Yeats' command of this is what makes him a great poet and what makes 'The Second Coming' a pretty awesome poem.