The Second Coming (poem)

The Second Coming is a poem by William Butler Yeats first printed in The Dial (November 1920) and afterwards included in his 1921 verse collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem utilizes religious symbolism to illustrate Yeats' anguish over the apparent decline of Europe's ruling class, and his occult belief that Western Civilization (if not the whole world) was nearing the terminal point of a 2000-year historical cycle.

The poem was inspired by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which Yeats viewed as a threat to the aristocratic class he favored. An early draft of the poem includes the lines: "The Germans are . . . now to Russia come/ Though every day some innocent has died." The Germans he refers to are the proto-fascist Freikorps operating on the Eastern border of Germany, whom Yeats approved of.

Early drafts also included such lines as: "And there's no Burke to cry aloud no Pitt," and "The good are wavering, while the worst prevail."

The sphinx or sphinx-like beast described in the poem had long captivated Yeats' imagination. He wrote the Introduction to his play The Resurrection, ‘I began to imagine [around 1904], as always at my left side just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast which I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction’, noting that the beast was ‘Afterwards described in my poem "The Second Coming."

Critic Yvor Winters has observed, ". . . we must face the fact that Yeats' attitude toward the beast is different from ours: we may find the beast terrifying, but Yeats finds him satisfying - he is Yeats' judgment upon all that we regard as civilized. Yeats approves of this kind of brutality."

The word 'gyre' used in the poem's first line is drawn from Yeats's book A Vision, which sets out a theory of history and metaphysics which Yeats claimed to have received from spirits. The theory of history articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram composed of two conical spirals, one situated inside the other, so that the widest part of one cone occupies the same plane as the tip of the other cone, and vice versa. Around these cones he imagined a set of spirals. Yeats claimed that this image (he called the spirals "gyres") captured contrary motions inherent within the process of history, and he divided each gyre into different regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual's development). Yeats believed that in 1921 the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic moment, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre.

In his own notes, Yeats explained: "The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to its place of greatest contraction... The revelation [that] approaches will... take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre..."

The lines "The best lack all convictions, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" are a paraphrase of one of the most famous passages from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, a book which Yeats, by his own admission, regarded from his childhood with religious awe:

In each human heart terror survives

The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear

All that they would disdain to think were true:

Hypocrisy and custom make their minds

The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.

They dare not devise good for man's estate,

And yet they know not that they do not dare.

The phrase "stony sleep" is drawn from The Book of Urizen by William Blake (one of the poets Yeats studied most intensely). In Blake's poem, Urizen falls, unable to bear the battle in heaven he has provoked. To ward off the fiery wrath of his vengeful brother Eternals, he frames a rocky womb for himself: "But Urizen laid in a stony sleep / Unorganiz'd, rent from Eternity." During this stony sleep, Urizen goes through seven ages of creation-birth as fallen man, until he emerges. This is man become the Sphinx of Egypt.

In the early drafts of the poem, Yeats used the phrase "the Second Birth," but substituted the phrase "Second Coming" while revising. His intent in doing so is not clear. The Second Coming described in the Biblical Book of Revelation is here anticipated as a gathering dark forces that would fill the population's need for meaning with a ghastly and dangerous sense of purpose. Yeats's vision has nothing in common with the Christian concept of the Second Coming of Christ, and critics are uncertain what Yeats intended by appropriating the term.

The "spiritus mundi" (spirit of the world) is a reference to Yeats' belief that each human mind is linked to a single vast intelligence, and that this intelligence causes certain universal symbols to appear in individual minds. The idea is similar to Carl Jung's concept of the collective unconscious.

The poem includes several well known phrases, such as "the centre cannot hold; things fall apart" (from which Chinua Achebe derived the title of his book, Things Fall Apart). The poem's final phrase, "what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" is another of Yeats' best-known lines. Joan Didion's 1968 collection of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, takes its title from the poem.

Sources

• Lucy McDiarmid, Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden Between the Wars, 1984.