About the Poem "The Second Coming" by Yeats

Yeats writes this poem after World War I. The conflict had left
Europe completely ravaged, cut adrift from any hope. The victors
were left to survey the immense loss of human life and
transformation of their society, while the losers had to deal with this
reality as well as the shame of losing. Both sides began to
understand that the principles and ideas which guided them into war
had been tested, and to a certain extent, deemed false. In this
vacuum where disbelief and a lack of faith began to permeate Europe
of the 1920s. In this, Yeats writes his poem. The poem, in summary,
prophesies that some sort of Second Coming (traditionally, this is the
return of Christ to Earth, as was promised in the New Testament) is
due, and that the anarchy that has arisen all around the world (partly
because of the events of the First World War. The poet is seeking the
second birth of savior and Prophet (Christ). After the World War II,
there was a complete disconnect between humankind and divinity. The
poem is divided into 2 sections. The first section talks about the
spiritual disconnect and suffering and on the other hand II section is
about the second birth of Prophet.

Detailed Explanation of the poem

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.
 The whole first section finds the speaker observing a world that
is losing touch with order and morality. Violence is destroying
innocence, people have become detached from their leaders,
something fundamental is dissolving, and people who believe in
goodness are being silenced, while the loudest speakers are the
villains and chaos-bringers. In the first stanza, Yeats talks about
the movement of the time which has widened the world. Here gyre
signifies the world. The falconer signifies father. And thus the Falcon is
not following its owner. There is a complete breakdown that prevents
connection and communication. Political downfall of Europe is depicted
here the world is paving blood tide everywhere. And innocence is lost
completely because of pain and suffering. In the last line, the poet says
that best people have chosen to be quiet whereas the worst people have
taken the front seat. The best are powerless and worst are in power.
Thus the first stanza is all about the afterworld of World War II and
its suffering.

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

The second section, beginning with the line "Surely some revelation is at
hand," finds the speaker sure that some major shift is happening around
him. All this chaos cannot be an accident, certainly. Something vast is
coming, some distorted version of the Christian apocalypse is descending
upon the land; some ending is approaching. In the second stanza, the
poet is very hopeful about some revelation and some positive outcome.
Second coming is signified as the second birth of Crist or the Prophet
which is going to happen. Here the exclamation mark depicts that this is
not a prophecy. Then, she sees a vast image of coming out of Spiritus
Mundi. It’s the spirit of the world collective. This distant image which
doesn’t encourage the poet, it rather troubles his sight. What Yeats
wants to see is the coming of Christ but what he gets to see is
something else.

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?

It’s a kind of Hallucination. Poet sees an unnatural image which has a

lion’s body and head of a man and Emotionless as the sun. This creature
is not going to bring any relief but only destruction. The beast is moving
slowly and is compared with the real shades of angry desert birds or
vultures. Now the image of the beast has disappeared and the poet says
that sleep of 20th century and nightmare is a painful experience. Hence
he realizes that Christ is not coming but the monstrous beast is coming
to the place where Christ was born. The last line is not a declaration of
birth of this beast but rather acquisition. The third section describes
the speaker's vision for what this Second Coming, this new world
redefined by all the violence and chaos that occurred in the past,
might look like. He thinks about the "Spiritus Mundi," which is a
Latin term meaning "World Spirit," and begins to visualize images
within this "World Spirit," including desert sphinxes and shadowy
birds.By the end of the poem, the speaker is sure that something
even worse is coming. Some nightmare—some "rough beast"—is
rising, approaching the earth at a rapid pace. He doesn't know
what this creature is, but he can sense its approach—and it is the
ominous core of "The Second Coming," that mysterious tide of evil
and mystery approaching the world in the form of a modernity full
of violence, war, and the loss of traditional meaning and values.
 Theme of the Poem :
"The Second Coming" is a response to a world wracked by
violence. Yeats wrote the poem 1919, right after the end of World
War I, in which 16 million people were killed in a horrifying display
of the power of modern technological warfare and of the continuing
conflicts that wracked the supposedly modern, civilized world. The
poem voices a sense of shock, dismay, and pessimism about the
future that many felt after the war. Lines like "blood-dimmed tide"
and "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" both eloquently describe
the horrific chaos of war and violence. Many people felt as if there
could never be another war after World War I; it was even called
"The War to End All Wars," because people believed that it was so
horrible and destructive that people would never allow something like
it to happen again. But Yeats foresaw a darker future, which of
course came to pass—World War II began a mere 14 years later,
and Yeats's second coming took the form of a modernity that
endowed humans with increasingly destructive weapons like the
atomic bomb, and continued to force people to question how far into
the violence the world could descend. This violent history continues,
with unimaginable violence continuing on in the Middle East and
around the world today.

The religious connotation in the poem:

The poem's overt Christian themes are written into its very title. Yeats
himself was not a Christian; he had abandoned the faith in exchange for
an interest in occult spirituality, which involved delving into the esoteric
mysteries of the universe. His own father, who had grown up as part of
the Established Church of Ireland, rejected Christianity at an early age,
and Yeats followed suit. But unlike his father, Yeats was deeply invested
in spirituality, constantly seeking a philosophy of life, which eventually
led him towards occultism and a sort of religious faith in the power of
words.In this poem, Yeats uses Christianity as a stand-in for all order,
ethics, and tradition. He borrows this poem's title from the Book of
Revelations, which describes Christ's return to earth after the end times
as a "second coming" (the first, of course, having been Christ's return
after his crucifixion).Crucially, in the Bible, Christ's return always occurs
after a death—of himself, or of the world, in the case of the Book of
Revelations. The world is spinning towards a kind of death, Yeats
predicts in this poem, but what rises out of the ashes will not be Christ—
it will be a mysterious "rough beast."

Symbolism in the poem

The falcon: The falcon, which has become separated from the
falconer, likely represents humanity itself, which has become detached
from its God, or from once-revered standards of morality and order.
The falconer
The falconer: The controller or master of falcon's ,may represents
God, or it may represent traditional values, ethical responsibility, and
order that was once in control of the falcon. The Second Coming,
whatever exactly it may be, has shattered the falconer's (ruler's)
contact with the falcon (ruled), leaving both stranded and alone.

The Gyre: Yeats opens "The Second Coming" with an image of a

falcon escaping the falconer, swinging outward in a "widening gyre" -- a
term Yeats coined to describe a circular path or pattern. As the falcon
flies in great arcs away from the falconer, so the world spins out of
control. The "gyre" was Yeats' symbol of a human epoch of 2,000 years.
The poem frames a 2,000-year historical progression, with the birth of
Christ marking the beginning and the war marking the end. When Yeats
uses the word "gyre," he's not only referring to the upward spiral of
the falcon (which is no longer under the falconer's control) but also
the spiraling out of control of civilization. Yeats uses the image of a
gyre--essentially, two spiral cones, each spiraling in opposite
directions--to represent the duality of mankind and historical
movements, both good and bad. In "The Second Coming," the negative
side of the gyre is taking control.
 The Tide: The remainder of the first stanza, after the "widening
gyre," deals with symbols of destruction and death. "Things fall apart,"
says Yeats, and "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." He uses the
symbol of a tide, "blood-dimmed," drowning innocence, that destroys
hope and from which humanity needs salvation.

The Second Coming: Yeats introduces the symbol of the second coming
in the second stanza, which is used as an answer to the first. The
destruction of the first stanza must stand for something, and Yeats sees
it as heralding a new epoch, or gyre. Yeats draws on the language of the
Book of Revelation to conjure an image of Christ's return. He further
included biblical symbolism when explaining that for 2,000 years (one
gyre), the sleep of the Sphinx was "vexed to nightmare by a rocking
cradle," presumably of the Christ-child. The second coming alludes to the
second coming of Christ to earth, promised in the biblical book of
Revelation, in which he will return to wipe all tears away and initiate the
uniting of heaven and earth. Yeats alludes to the events in recent
history—"mere anarchy," " blood-dimmed tide," and innocence
"drowned"—which are references to World War I and the Russian
revolution. The speaker first thinks these events must presage the
second coming of Christ, the dawn of some new age.
The Sphinx: As soon as the poet employs this Christian positive image,
he becomes troubled by the vision of another kind of second coming which
is the most powerful symbol -- the Sphinx -- to offer his prediction of
the future of the world and of humanity. As soon as he alludes to Christ,
a "vast image" of a pagan religion appears to wander toward Bethlehem.
The symbol here is of the end of a religion that, for Yeats, embodied
hope and innocence. Its power is gone, and the hour of the "rough beast"
-- The phrase "shape with a lion body and a head of a man" describes a
sphinx, a mythological creature that often guards the entrance to hidden
treasures in ancient myths. Sphinxes are known for being cruel
tricksters, and in many myths, sphinxes ask those trying to pass by to
solve riddles; they devour those who cannot answer correctly. In "The
Second Coming," the sphinx marks the narrator's riddle-laden entrance
into a nightmarish vision of the future, which he accesses through the
liminal, dreamlike space of the poem. The Sphinx, an allusion to pre-
Christian religion -- has come around again. In the poet's view, the
Sphinx, after "twenty centuries of stony sleep," was awakened by the
unbelievable devastation created by WWI and, more important, by
mankind's inability to regain its morality. Yeats' question, then, "And
what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches towards
Bethlehem to be born?" brings the original reference to the Second
Coming to a shattering conclusion.
The rough beast: The "rough beast," the thing "Slouching towards
Bethlehem to be born," is a force that will define the entirety of the
aftermath of the Second Coming. It most likely represents a dark,
chaotic, unpredictable future, but its arrival could also hint at changes
that could lead to new possibilities.

Literary devices in "The Second Coming" include the following:

Antithesis: Antithesis is when two contrasting ideas or images are put
together. A central motif of this poem is that the second coming
Yeats envisions contrasts sharply with the second coming promised in
the Bible. This is not Jesus the savior returning to earth to establish
the kingdom of God. It is the exact opposite, a second coming of a
primal evil loosed upon the world. Imagining the pitiless beast coming
to Bethlehem to be born is also antithetical to the idea of that
location as the birthplace of Jesus, who is understood as the prince
of mercy and peace.