The Second Coming
Story.
The world is falling apart, the best are falling are falling apart and the worst are
triumphing. The speaker wonders aloud about the Second Coming, and his voice
summons a Sphinx creature in the desert to wake from two millennia of sleep, and as
night falls, it moves off towards Bethlehem.
Structure.
There are three parts to this poem. The first is two lines long, the second six and the third
fourteen. There is little rhyme in the poem, although lines do occasionally end with
similar sounding words. There is a relatively regular rhythm.
Language.
Yeats makes various references to his philosophy - "gyre", "the Second Coming",
"twenty centuries of stony sleep". Various semi-Biblical language is used - "ceremony",
"the sands of the desert", "Bethlehem to be born".
Diction.
The first third of the poem is in the first person, and the poem's focus is the third person.
The first person is used to make the creature's existence more actual, having both a poetic
and visionary realism, which combine summarise the poet's sense of the world. In the
final line appears a question, which is used to confirm the atmosphere of the poem.
Tone.
The poem opens with a neutral tone, the non-realistic imagery makes the opening
disengaged. The impact of the first two lines is not lent by tone, but by their peculiarity
and imagery. The sense of devastation that pervades the poem is introduced in the second
part, it is explicitly stated that "things fall apart", and this is further emphasised by the
words "anarchy", "blood-dimmed tide", "passionate intensity". However, the poem itself,
which is so far dealing in abstractions, lacks this passionate intensity - its tone could be
more accurately described as "anxious".
The religious cry of the third part coalesces the tone into a more frightening form. It is
this stanza that the first person is introduced, and the poet's own "vast image" emerges
from the desert. The description of its "blank and pitiless" gaze lends a more prophetic
frightening tone to the conclusion of the poem, which ends in a rhetorical question.
Mood.
The mood of the opening two lines is confused, dizzy, "turning and turning". The mood
falls over, as it were, at the beginning of the second part "things fall apart". The
abstraction of the second part adds to the dizzy confusion that is the mood. Even
humanity is not explicitly named - they are "the best" and "the worst". Finally, however,
in the third part the focus of the imagery becomes "troubl[ing]", and the adjectives
applied to this one image are "vast", "pitiless", and so, by the focus, the troubling
atmosphere becomes disturbing, and, because it is unresolved, the poem's final impact is
shattering.
Poetic Devices.
Repetition - "turning and turning", "falcon... falconer", "loosed... loosed", "surely...
surely", "the Second Coming... The Second Coming!"
Alliteration - "Surely some", "stony sleep"
Onomatopoeia - "vexed", "slouches"
Figures of Speech.
Simile - "blank and pitiless as the sun"
Metaphor - "stony sleep"
Imagery.
The first two images are complimentary - the spinning gyre, producing dizziness, and the
lost falcon, which cannot answer the calls it is trained for, it is lost. In a sense, power is
useless. The imagery of the second part is much less specific - it is general "anarchy".
The third part contains the key image of the poem - the Second Coming not being the
triumphant return of Christ, but the re-awakening of the pre-Christian era. Its
representative is the powerful, half-animal Sphinx. Its body is that of a "lion", only the
head of a man is left. Man's thoughts would be mixed with the pre-human power of the
lion's claws.
The "indignant desert birds" are the expendable "shadows", the weak humans cowering
before the terror, not completely understanding it. Finally, the poem focuses on the
speaker's own mind, via the falling "darkness". It is knowledge that is being given to the
reader. The power of the "twenty centuries of stony sleep" was woken by a "rocking
cradle".
Theme.
The Second Coming is about disintegration, about chaos, about the sudden change that
can be called from the littlest thing and reach out its tendrils to enfold the world.