“The Second Coming”

General Meaning”

Yeats starts the poem with the image of a falcon flying to far from
its master. It is lost. This refers to the collapse of traditional social
arrangement in Europe.

Then Yeats describes “anarchy” and violence in which “ ceremony of

innocence is drowned”. This violence becomes a sign that “ The Second
Coming is at hand”.

The poet imagines a sphynix in the desert. This mythical animal

fulfill the prophecy that “darkness drops again”

The poem ends up with a rhetorical question that this beast is on

its way to Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ to be born.

The images used in the poem

● The widening gyre

● Falcon and falconer
● The blood-dimmed tide
● The sphynix (the great beast)

Themes of the poem

● The conflict between

1. good and evil
2. Society and class
3. Memory and the past
● Mysticism and the Occult
● The impact of fate and the divine on history.

Form & Meter

The Poem is written in iambic pentameter.

Literary Devices

1- Metaphor
● The falcon and the falconer : represent humanity and a controlling
force that sets humans on a specific path.
● The blood-dimmed tide : refers to the waves of violence
● Ceremony of innocence is a metaphor for the entirety of human
innocence and goodness
● The rough beast is a metaphor for the mysterious, rapidly
approaching Second Coming
2- Alliteration
“turning and turning”, “falcon, falconer, fall”, darkness drops”,
stony sleep”
3- Irony
“the best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
4- Personification
The collapse of order is personified as a “rough beast”
5- Allusion
The “Spiritus Mundi” is an illusion to a Latin phrase meaning
“world soul”

Q/ How does “The Second Coming allude to other myths about

the interaction of the divine and human?.
Yeats believed that history repeats itself with a difference.
That means events in one cycle correspond to events in another.
Yeats’s poem emphasizes the brutality and horror as well as the
significance of the event. In “The Second Coming” the poet uses
the “rough beast” as a metaphor of violence and disruption which
characterize the end of one cycle and the beginning of another.
The speaker of the poem seems to welcome a change, a new
birth, however, his excitement mingles with fear as he realizes
that the “Second Coming” may bring a “rough,” terrible beast
rather than Christ, to whose return the title of the poem ironically
alludes.

Questions on “ Sailing to Byzantium”

Q1/ Yeats was in his sixties when he published “ Sailing to

Byzantium.” To what extent can it be said that the poem’s subject
is aging and the suffering it brings?
It is true that the poem’s subject is the aging process, but
the occasion of its cry, is the speaker’s awareness of growing
older. This situation of aging serves both as a premise for the
poem and as a metaphor for the dilemma of an individual divided
against himself: for, as he ages, once vital poet feels a split within
himself between his desires and abilities. His heart is “sick with
desire/ and fastened to a dying animal”.
Describing an aged man as “ but a paltry thing,” the speaker
here can neither satisfy nor sublimate his desires. The poet’s
admission that his heart is “sick with desire” suggests that the
journey to Byzantium, and the search for transcendence through
art, constitutes to sublimate his sensual desires. He begs the sages
to help him to be a poet and can sing of time without being
tyrannized by it.