The Second Coming

The gyre is Yeats's central symbol for historical cycles. The falcon spiraling outward represents civilization moving beyond the control of its creator. This opening image captures the breakdown of the social order Yeats saw unfolding after World War I—the center of authority can no longer command its agents.

Yeats opens with kinetic energy: the repeated 'turning' mimics the widening spiral. The falcon-falconer relationship is one of trained obedience now failing. The enjambment across lines enacts the falcon's flight beyond reach. The gyre, drawn from Yeats's occult system in A Vision, represents the 2,000-year historical cycle nearing its end.

Perhaps the most quoted lines in twentieth-century poetry. 'Things fall apart' has become a universal phrase for civilizational collapse—Chinua Achebe used it as his novel's title. The 'centre' is both political authority and spiritual meaning. 'Mere anarchy' is devastating: 'mere' here means 'pure' or 'absolute,' not 'trivial.'

The monosyllabic force of 'Things fall apart' is devastating in its simplicity. Yeats moves from the particular image (falcon) to universal abstraction. 'Mere' carries its older sense of 'absolute' or 'utter.' The semicolon creates a pause that mirrors the moment before collapse accelerates into chaos.

The 'blood-dimmed tide' evokes both the Red Sea and the apocalyptic rivers of blood in Revelation. 'Ceremony of innocence' is Yeats's phrase for the ritualized social order that gives life meaning and beauty—aristocratic culture, religious observance, artistic tradition. Its drowning signals the end of an epoch.

'Blood-dimmed tide' fuses the natural (tide) with the horrific (blood), creating a synaesthetic image of murky, contaminated waters. 'Ceremony of innocence' is deliberately paradoxical—ceremony implies formality while innocence implies naturalness. Together they represent ordered, unselfconscious beauty being overwhelmed by violence.

A diagnosis that remains terrifyingly relevant. The cultivated and thoughtful are paralyzed by doubt, while fanatics act with terrible certainty. Yeats saw this in the Russian Revolution, the Irish Civil War, and the rise of fascism. The chiasmus (best/lack vs. worst/full) makes the imbalance formally precise.

The antithesis is devastatingly clean: best/worst, lack/full, conviction/passionate intensity. Yeats diagnoses the modern political crisis: liberal uncertainty against extremist certainty. The closing of the first stanza with this couplet leaves no resolution—only the stark diagnosis of a world inverted.

The repeated 'Surely' carries both desperate hope and ironic certainty. Yeats pivots from diagnosis to prophecy. The 'Second Coming' invokes Christian eschatology but Yeats will subvert it entirely—what comes is not Christ's return but something far more disturbing. The repetition creates an incantatory, almost ritualistic tone.

The anaphoric 'Surely' creates urgency while the near-repetition of the two lines (with 'revelation' becoming 'Second Coming') narrows the focus from general to specific. Yeats exploits the gap between the Christian meaning of 'Second Coming' and what he will reveal—this is strategic misdirection before the poem's terrible vision.

Spiritus Mundi (Spirit of the World) is Yeats's term for the collective unconscious—a reservoir of archetypal images shared by all humanity. The exclamation mark after 'Second Coming' shows the phrase itself summons the vision. 'Troubles my sight' suggests both visual disturbance and prophetic torment.

The poem breaks into breathless, enjambed syntax. 'Hardly are those words out' creates immediacy—the naming conjures the thing. Spiritus Mundi is Yeats's version of Jung's collective unconscious: a storehouse of universal symbols. The colon after 'sight' creates a dramatic pause before the revelation.

The Sphinx-like creature is Yeats's anti-Christ—the rough beast of the new age. The 'lion body and head of a man' inverts the traditional Sphinx (human body, lion head). 'Blank and pitiless as the sun' is one of the great similes in English poetry: the sun gives life indifferently, without mercy or malice. The 'slow thighs' suggest awakening after millennia of sleep.

The lowercase 'somewhere' after the colon is brilliantly disorienting—we're thrust into a vague, mythic landscape. The composite creature recalls Egyptian sphinxes but is uniquely Yeatsian. 'Blank and pitiless as the sun' achieves sublimity: the sun's gaze is inhuman precisely because it is beyond human categories of pity. The slow movement suggests geological, not human, time.

The 'rocking cradle' is Christ's manger—Christianity's birth disturbed the beast's sleep, and now, two thousand years later, it awakens. 'Slouches' is the poem's masterstroke: not marching, not striding, but slouching—casual, inevitable, indifferent. The question mark at the end refuses closure, leaving the reader in terrified uncertainty about what new age is being born.

The final question is among the most haunting in English literature. 'Slouches' is deliberately anti-heroic—this is not a triumphant arrival but a casual, unstoppable approach. Bethlehem links the new birth to Christ's but inverts its meaning: where Christ brought salvation, this beast brings unknown horror. The question mark is essential: Yeats will not name what comes, preserving the poem's prophetic ambiguity.