Poem of the Week – The Second Coming by WB Yeats
William Butler Yeats began his poetic career preoccupied by lofty themes of transcendentalism. As he aged, his lyrical mastery of memorable phrase-making and striking ability to conceive captivating metaphors ensured his place as the best Irish poet of his generation. In 1923, his reputation reached lasting international acclaim when he won the Nobel Prize. Acting as a monumental bridge between the romantic literature of the 19th century and the disillusioned poetry of modernism, Yeats inspired an enormous number of brilliant future poets including TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg and WH Auden, among others.
Fascinated by esoteric studies and mystical phenomena, Yeats spent much of his intellectual life investigating strange occurrences in nature and supposed cases of psychic events. He subscribed to theosophical notions of existence, time and death, and symbolically drew from those arcane assertions to adorn his pioneering poetry. This week’s poem is one of his best known.
The Second Coming was written in the midst of a pandemic that gripped Europe after the First World War. Yeats’ wife, who was pregnant at the time, caught the disease and it was during her convalescence that he completed this composition. Using biblical imagery, it describes the mood of a post-war society, where many traditional certainties have been destroyed. An air of foreboding lours over the actions in the poem and all appears doomed as the messiah wakes from his sleep and ‘slouches towards Bethelhem’. We hope you enjoy this week’s poem as much as we did.
The Second Coming by WB Yeats
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,T
he 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;
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?