William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is the greatest Irish poet and a monumental figure in earlier twentieth-

century literature, who represents, in his life and work, the transition from late Romanticism to the
Modernism which came to dominate literature in English in the period between the two world wars.

Yeats compressed and embodied his personal mythology in visionary poems of great scope, linguistic
force and incantatory power, such as “The Second Coming” and “Leda and the Swan”. In poems of
1920s and 1930s, winding stairs, spinning tops, “gyres”, spirals of all kinds are important symbols,
serving as means of resolving some of the contraries that had arrested him from the beginning-
paradoxes of time and eternity, change and continuity, spirit and the body, life and art.

"The Second Coming" from Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Robarts) (1921) is perhaps Yeat’s most
masterful, highly regarded poem. It was written in early January 1919; its sense of murderousness
conceivably encompasses World War I, the Easter Rising and the Russian Revolution. "The Second
Coming" is viewed as a predictive poem that predicts the close of the Christian period and the
vicious birth of a new era. The poem's title makes reference to the Biblical reappearance of Christ.
Other symbols in the poem are drawn from mythology, the occult, and Yeats's view of history as defined
in his cryptic prose volume a Vision. To Yeats, the Second Coming is not a savior that is going to restore
the business of humanity, but a sphinx that will add more to the agony and destruction of the world. He
argues that people are moving away from the center and there is no hope in the future due to the chaos.
And those, who wish for any spiritual guidance, are living in fool’s paradise.

The poem consists of two stanzas where the first stanza has eight while the second stanza has fourteen
lines. The poem does not follow any standard form of poetry. Both the stanzas are quite different in
attitude.  The first stanza begins with an objective approach while the second stanza is more personal
and subjective. The poem ends in doubt and fear which arises from the prophecy about the future of the
world. It gives a prophecy that the future of the world is not going to be a good one

Violence, cyclicality, and Christianity are the major themes foregrounded in this poem

Violence

The theme of violence in 'The Second Coming' is obvious throughout the work. As a result of the context
in which the poem was written, this is to be expected. The aftermath of WWI was horrible for the global
population, but Yeats took it especially personally as someone who opposed violence to begin with. He
predicted that the violence of the war would not end there, and he was right of course, as WWII began
20 years after the poem was written. We can see the theme of violence in the vicious imagery he uses.
The first image of the poem is a falcon being lost from its handler as the gyre (the end of a 2,000-year
cycle) and sphinx-like creature unleash anarchy across the earth. The loss of the falcon from its handler
can represent the loss of humanity's connection with  the natural  world or the loss of humanity's ability
to control the violent progression of the world. Both failures of the species in this example lead to the
moral decay depicted in lines 7-8. We then see a bloody tide that sweeps the planet, drowning
innocence.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The  ceremony  of innocence is drowned;"

This bloody tide that is loosed upon the world represents the bloodshed of WWI in Europe and the
seemingly inescapable moral failing of humankind to prevent this from occurring.

The "blood-dimmed" tide drowns the "ceremony  of innocence", meaning that the bloody sins of the
world are too numerous for humanity to claim its innocence still.

The "rough beast" that slinks towards Bethlehem is not Jesus, but the representation of humanity's
moral corruptness and violence overtaking a peaceful place such as Bethlehem or, in this case, Europe.
This is an indicator of how the speaker feels about human  nature.

As we see with the falcon, the loss of humanity's control on its connection to  nature  and the
unstoppable force of history repeating itself (the gyre) indicate a need for peace and wisdom that we do
not receive, leading the speaker to recite images from Revelations in the Bible (beasts coming to
consume the earth, the Second Coming, and the bloody tide itself).

Cyclicality

As a poem, 'The Second Coming' is concerned with the cyclical nature of things, as Yeats believed that
history moved in 2,000-year cycles that repeated themselves. 'The Second Coming' states in lines 18-20:

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

This passage is explicitly concerned with the cyclical  nature  of the world, as it states: the darkness
comes, but now I (the speaker) know that 2,000 years of the creature "sleeping" (or being buried) awoke
in a nightmare as a result of the ending cycle. In this example, the rocking cradle (a haunting image) is
reminiscent(remënisënt) of the birth of Christ 2,000 years previous. The creature being woken up
represents the ending of the era of Christ and European life as it was known and indicates the dawn of a
new era, opening with a violent creature with a more-than-human capacity for aggression.

Christianity

'The Second Coming' contains an abundance of Christian allusions. A few allusions to Revelations are
indicated below:

 The Rocking Cradle:  As indicated above, the rocking cradle represents the birth of the Christ-
child in Bethlehem 2,000 years previous, and creates a distinct juxtaposition between the
terrifying desert creature and the violence it brings and the birth of the Prince of Peace (Jesus
Christ)
  The title 'The Second Coming':  The title itself is an allusion to the event of the Second Coming of
Christ as mentioned in the Book of Revelation. Yeats points out through naming the poem 'The
Second Coming' as well as lines 9-12 that the aftermath of WWI was so horrific that another
2,000-year cycle must have begun with the coming of the sphinx creature. This indication that
WWI was so awful that the Second Coming must be at hand was likely hyperbole on Yeats' part,
as Yeats was heavily invested in mysticism, never outwardly resolving his beliefs towards
Christianity in his lifetime. In 'The Second Coming', while humanity is expecting something
wonderful as the Second Coming of Christ, at the end of the 2,000-year cycle humanity is greeted
by something far more monstrous, with no salvation in sight.

 The Bloody Tide:  Water running red with blood or turning to blood occurs several times within
the Bible, as seen in the story of Moses and Revelations. In Revelations, there is a vision that the
water will run red with blood at the Second Coming of Christ as humanity descends into Chaos.

Despite Yeats himself renouncing organised religions such as Christianity, his use of Christian imagery
meant his audiences in English-speaking Europe would be well aware of the Christian language used.

Besides allusion that I meantioned before, Yeat uses many different literary devices in his poem “The
second coming”. One that is a hallmark of his poetic style is half-rhyme which we can se in “gyre\
falconer” and “hold/world”. He uses many metrical variations, especially initial trochaic substitutions.
Furthermore, some of the literary devices used in this poem are: metaphor, alliteration, repetition,
symbolism,

There are several places in the poem where Yeats uses metaphor, especially the opening lines:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

The falcon stands as metaphor for humanity which has lost its direction and is unable to “hear” the voice
of the divine. The figure of the beast which heralds the Biblical apocalypse is also used metaphorically by
Yeats in this poem

Then in the lines : The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle

Yeats uses the metaphor of sleep to compare the two thousand year span of time between Christ’s
original appearance and the second coming. Yeat’s metaphor reveals that the ‘sleep’ has been uneasy
through his diction and the use of the word ‘stony; which has the connotation of hardness and general
lack of comfort.
Alliteration- He uses alliteration in several places, such as the repetition sound \s\ in “Troubles my sight:
somewhere in sands” and /n/ sound in “The darkness drops again; but now I know.”

Repetition- The repetition of “surely” in lines 9-10 serves for two purposes. It establishes an implication
between the earlier discussed chaos and the Second Coming, with chaos serving as the antecedent in the
implication. It also underscores the certainty of the revelation through the use of ‘surely’. Other
examples of repetition are: “Turning and turning”, “falcon..falconer”, “loosed…loosed”

Symbolism: Yeats has used multiple symbols such as ‘the gyre’ which is used to represent swirling,
turning landscape of life itself,

-“The falcon”- which is a symbol for a lost of humanity, at the mercy of uncontrollable forces

-‘the falconer’- a symbol that may represent God or a wider standard of ethics or morality.

-the blood dimmed tide- is a symbol that respresent overwhelming violence and uncontrollable chaos.

Hyperbole- The poet has used hyperbole in the tenth line where it is stated as, “Surely the Second
Coming is at hand,” as if the beast is about to enter the world  in just  a few hours or days.

Assonance- such as the sound of /i/ in “Turning and turning in the widening gyre” and /e/ sound in “The
ceremony of innocence is drowned

Conclusion: As poetry comprehended widely than as a simple reiteration of the mystic theory of a vision,
“The Second Coming” is a magnificent statement about the contrary forces at work in history, and
about the conflict between the modern world and the ancient world. Perhaps the poem does not carry
the thematic importance of Yeats's greatest work, and might not be a poem with which many people can
personally identify; but the aesthetic experience of its passionate language is powerful enough to ensure
its value and its importance in Yeats's work as a whole. The poem's power of image and language is to
some extent independent of Yeats's own ideas, and by using Biblical echoes, both in style and
reference, Yeats makes the poem immediate, which some of the other poems that originate from the
system of a vision need. It draws on the cultural context in which one tends to read it, giving expression
to idealistic fear and the emotion that one lives in periods of extraordinary turmoil, whether or not one
really does.