"The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats: Analysis and Commentary

Copyright 2020 by Gary L. Pullman

 

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 convictions, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

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

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?

Commentary

The title of this poem alludes to the return of Jesus Christ, as prophesied in the Book of Revelation and elsewhere in the Bible. The title thus establishes an expectation (the return of Jesus Christ) that the poem will overturn.

As the poem opens, a falcon is circling overhead. Unable to hear its trainer, the falcon is disoriented. Instead of its circles becoming narrower and narrower as it returns to its master, the falcon’s circles widen more and more as it seeks the falconer:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer. . . .

In Medieval times, aristocrats used falcons to hunt smaller birds. The falcon and the falconer appear to symbolize Western culture and civilization in their widest senses, including their political, military, and artistic dimensions. As such, the falcon and the falconer represent the larger social constructs that “center” humanity (at least in the West). However, we are told that “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Instead, order has given way to the lawless confusion of anarchy, followed by violence, and a “blood-dimmed tide is loosed” upon the world. Days of innocence are gone, and the good among humanity stand idly by, doing nothing, lacking “all convictions,” while the dregs of society “are full of passionate intensity.”

This dire state of affairs makes the speaker of the poem think that “some revelation” must be about to be seen or heard:

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

At the words “Second Coming,” an image appears to him, coming, it seems, from “Spiritus Mundi,” the World-Soul. (Today, we might refer to this as the collective unconscious.) The image is strange and terrifying, a sphinx-like creature with a “gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” crawling across the desert on “slow thighs.” The troubling revelation ends abruptly, with a dropping down of darkness.

However, in seeing the image of the strange, fearsome creature, the speaker has come to understand that “twenty centuries of [its] stony sleep/ Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle” (that is, by the birth of Christ). Now, instead of the return of the son of God, it appears that some “rough beast, its hour come round at last,/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.” The term “beast” makes us think, perhaps, of the “beast” of the Book of Revelation, the anti-Christ.

 
The failure of human civilization will not be followed by a return of Jesus, to judge the living and the dead, but by the birth of some “rough beast” whose rule was interrupted by the “twenty centuries of sleep” that ensued Jesus’ birth. The beast’s “hour has come round at last,” the speaker of the poem tells us, suggesting that its birth is inevitable, even, perhaps, predestined, and it will be born in the same place in which Jesus Christ was born. However, this creature will be no savior. Rather, the poem suggests, it will be the antithesis of a savior; it will be a destroyer.

Although the poem alludes to a Biblical prophecy, to depict the beast of Revelation, it describes a lumbering sphinx. Born of the monsters Typhon and Echidna, the sphinx, one version of which had the body of a lion and the face of a man, has been held to represent various things, including Egypt’s gods and pharaohs. In addition, it served in ancient Egypt as a guard of holy places and tombs. (A sphinx with a woman’s head also strangled travelers who were unable to answer its riddle.) Some sphinxes also had falcons’ heads. In human-headed animals, some scholars have seen a transition from an all-encompassing nature worship in which humans were seen as just another animal among animals (hence, the human heads on animals) to a polytheism in which emergent human beings, as gods, came to rule over nature. Perhaps, in “The Second Coming,” a reversal of this process is happening, as the concept of God as a transcendent Creator is replaced by the older view in which humans are again seen as fully immanent parts of nature.

Polytheistic Egyptian religion was a form of nature worship, in which the Egyptians sought to placate the gods that ruled the natural forces that their Nile-dependent society needed to survive. It is this concept of humanity, nature, and God that, represented by the merciless, sphinx-like creature, will supplant the Judeo-Christian concepts of humanity, nature, and God. A plurality of gods will replace a single God as people concern themselves with this world and their place within nature rather than with one, transcendent God who gives unity to his creation, calling humanity to embrace ideals that are rooted in faith rather than in nature and mere survival. The birth of the sphinx-like creature in Bethlehem appears to symbolize the beginning of a “new” age and the acceptance of a different value system than the one that humanity has embraced for the past two thousand years. It will be a revolutionary time accompanied by violence, lawlessness, and a widespread loss of innocence. An old cycle is about to begin anew.