THE SECOND

COMING
William Butler Yeats
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

■ Born June 13, 1865 ■ Irish poet and one of the foremost
– Sandymount, Ireland figures of the 20th- century literature
■ Died January 28 1939
■ Helped found the Abbey Theater
– Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, London
■ Parents
■ Served two terms as a Senator of the
– John Butler Yeats
Irish Free State
– Susan Pillexflen ■ Received the Nobel Prize for
■ Education in London Literature in 1923
■ Studied poetry at a young age, and became ■ Yeats wrote ”The Second Coming” in
fascinated by Irish Legends 1919 after the end of World War 1
■ Began his first writing at the age of 17
THE PASSAGE

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.

Surely some revelation is at hand; I choose this passage because by reading the first
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.    stanza the speaker describes a nightmarish scene.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out    Due to the fact that today is the first of October,
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi things are about to get “spooky” and I like how
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert    this poem has a darker appearance and play into
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
the Halloween spirit.
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
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?
SPEAKER/OCCASION

■ Speaker ■ Within the first stanza, the speaker

– Someone who can see things that no
one else can
– Observing the world around them
with horror
– Very pessimistic
– Not afraid to use religious imagery
observes a world that is losing touch
with order
– Violence is destroying innocence
and people have become
detached from their leaders

– The loudest speaker in the

beginning are the villains and
chaos-bringers
ORGANIZATION

■ The poem begins with ”Turning and turning in the widening gyre” – this evokes a
supernatural symbol of interlocked circles. Indicating that there is something churning
and awakening something new into existence out of the current haze of life that we are
living in.
■ The end of the first stanza alludes to the fact that something very drastic is coming
■ The second stanza describes the speakers vision, and how a “lion body and the head of a
man” was approaching the earth at a rapid pace.
■ The approach of the creature is the ominous core of ”The Second Coming”
– The mysterious tide of evil and mystery approaching the world in the form of a
modernity full of violence, war, and loss of traditional meaning and values
WHAT THE AUTHOR IS DOING

■ The author is trying to persuade people that after all of the chaos, confusion, and pain in the
world a savior was coming to save them
■ Yeats uses an alternative Christian idea of the “Second Coming”
– He uses imagery in the second stanza of the speaker receiving a vison of the future, but
this vision replaces Jesus’s heroic return with a grotesque beast
■ Lion body with a man’s head

Yeats is ultimately trying to persuade people of society’s collapse

ALLUSIONS
■ The poem alludes to the biblical
Book of Revelation
– When Jesus returns to Earth to
save the worthy
– This happened when humanity
reaches the end
■ The poem suggest that the end times
are already happening, because
humanity has lost all sense of
morality, and perhaps that this
morality was only an allusion to
begin with
■ The first line of the second stanza, the
poem hints that a moment of divine
intervention must be at hand (after all
of the chaos from the first stanza)
■ Rather than returning the world to
peace, this new revelation makes
things worst
– the grotesque beast heads
towards Bethlehem (the
birthplace of Jesus)
CONCLUSION
• Yeats makes a lot of ideas about
how the world is going to end
due to the beast that is coming
• He alludes to the idea of Jesus,
but instead of “The Second
Coming” being a savior, it is evil
SOURCES

■ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
■ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)
■ https://poets.org/poet/w-b-yeats