"The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920 and included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to describe allegorically the atmosphere of post-war Europe. It is considered a canonical work of modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.

Background

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence in January 1919, which followed the Easter Rising in April 1916, and before the British government had decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland. This period also saw the 1918–1919 flu pandemic, which Yeats' pregnant wife, Georgie, contracted in the weeks preceding the authorship of "The Second Coming". The highest death rates of the pandemic were among pregnant women, who in some areas had a mortality rate of up to 70%, but Georgie survived. Yeats wrote the poem while his wife was convalescing. Each of these eras began and ended with a gyration of spiritual forces, which he described as follows in A Vision:<blockquote>"A line is a symbol of time, and expresses a movement, symbolising the emotional subjective mind without extension in space; a plane, cutting the line at right angles, is spatial, the symbol of objectivity and intellect. A gyre is a combination of line and plane, and as one tendency or the other must always be stronger, the gyre is always expanding or contracting. The gyre is drawn as a cone which represents sometimes the individual soul and its history, sometimes general life. For this cone two cones are substituted since neither the soul of man or nature can be expressed without conflict." Yeats used the phrase "the second birth" instead of "the Second Coming" in his first drafts, reflecting this idea of a new moral order being born from a time of crisis. To Yeats, one of these gyres, represented by Greco-Roman society, had been replaced by Christianity's set of values, but a reversion to the moral principles of Greek and Roman society was inevitable at the inflection point of the 20th century. For example, in "His Memories", one of Yeats' later poems, Yeats equates Maud Gonne, a woman he believed represented the apocalyptic moral turning point of the era, to Helen of Troy, to whom he attributed the death of Hector and destruction of Troy. Yeats deeply admired and frequently discussed the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who described this reversal of the moral order due to Christianity in works such as On the Genealogy of Morality. The First World War and the beginning of war in Ireland only heightened these attitudes that the world was at an apocalyptic crisis point, where the world's moral order would be reversed. The repetition of the term "loosed" serves to restate the widening, or loosening, of the gyre, calling back to the ultimate cause of these events. This image concerns a sphinx in the desert, with a "blank and pitiless" expression. Meanwhile, the "indignant" desert birds circling the sphinx contrast with the falcon present at the beginning of the poem. The narrator then remarks that he is now aware that twenty centuries of sleep were "vexed to nightmare" by a rocking cradle, with the juxtaposition of the nightmare and cradle "insist[ing] that the source of terror was bred in the apparent peace of the culturally hypostatized infancy of Christ." The poem ends with a rhetorical question associating a "rough beast," whose birth is imminent, with Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ.

Critical engagement

In 2009, David A. Ross identified "The Second Coming" as "one of the most famous poems in the English language", echoing Harold Bloom who, in 1986, cited the piece as "one of the most universally admired poems of our century".

Critics agree that the poetry of Percy Shelley had a strong influence on the drafting of "The Second Coming". The first stanza matches the tone, diction, and syntax of Prometheus Unbound. Both Harold Bloom and Jon Stallworthy speculate that the poem's sphinx draws on the imagery of Shelley's "Ozymandias". The line at the end of the first stanza, "the worst are full of passionate intensity," has received particular attention from these scholars, who believe this characterization envisions populism and a political activity centered around charisma. Richard Ellmann understood the "rough beast" of the final lines as a creature to be born itself in Bethlehem, marking the cyclical (and violent) overturning of an age; furthermore, noting that "the final intimation that the new god will be born in Bethlehem, which Christianity associates with passive infancy and the tenderness of maternal love, makes the brutishness particularly frightful." Giorgio Melchiori identified this same idea in Yeats' other writings, noting that

Influence

Titles

Phrases in the poem have been adopted as the title in a variety of media. The words "things fall apart" in the third line are alluded to by Chinua Achebe in his novel Things Fall Apart (1958), and Jon Ronson in his podcast series Things Fell Apart (2021).

Similarly, the words "the centre cannot hold" in the same line are used in the title of Elyn Saks' book about her experience with schizophrenia while obtaining her PhD at Oxford, and later her JD at Yale, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (2008), Jonathan Alter's book on U.S. President Barack Obama's first term, The Center Holds (2013), the Netflix biographical documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017), Sleater-Kinney's album The Center Won't Hold (2019), and Junkie XL's song "The Center Will Not Hold, Twenty Centuries Of Stony Sleep" in the film Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021).

Additionally, the phrase "slouches towards Bethlehem" in the last line is referenced in the title of Joan Didion's collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Robert Bork's non-fiction work Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996), Daniel Ravipinto and Star Foster's interactive fiction game Slouching Towards Bedlam (2003), and Brad DeLong's economic history Slouching Towards Utopia (2022).

Other works whose titles come from lines in the poem includes Walker Percy’s novel The Second Coming (1980),

Quotes

The poem is quoted extensively in several books, including Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s political manifesto The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949), and Stephen King's novel The Stand (1978). the director's cut of Nixon (1995), multiple episodes including "The Second Coming" (2007) of The Sopranos, the last episode of Devs (2020), the episode "The Queen's Speech" (2021) of See, and by Kenneth Clark in the final episode of his 1969 documentary series Civilisation.

The reference to the beast "[slouching] towards Bethlehem" in the poem's final line is quoted in the first verse of Irish singer-songwriter Andrew John Hozier-Byrne's track NFWMB.

References

  • Text (as originally published)