The Second Coming

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; 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?

Interpretation by Claude

Historical Context

“The Second Coming” was written in 1919 and first published in Yeats’s 1921 poetry collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem emerged in the immediate aftermath of World War I and during the Irish War of Independence. Yeats composed it amid pandemic (the Spanish flu), political violence, and the collapse of old certainties. The poem reflects not just contemporary chaos but Yeats’s cyclical theory of history—that civilizations rise and fall in 2,000-year cycles, or “gyres.” Christianity’s era was ending, he believed, and something darker was being born.

The Vision

The poem’s central image—the “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem—has become one of the most quoted lines in English literature precisely because of its terrible ambiguity. What is this creature? A new savior? An anti-Christ? The birth of fascism? The return of paganism? Yeats refuses to specify. The sphinx-like figure with its “gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” suggests not evil exactly, but something utterly inhuman and indifferent to human values. The falcon that cannot hear the falconer, the center that cannot hold—these are images of authority breaking down, of civilization losing its coherence.

Why It Endures

What makes “The Second Coming” so perpetually relevant is its refusal of comfort. Most apocalyptic visions promise either redemption or clear villainy. Yeats offers neither. His vision is of dissolution and transformation into something we cannot yet name. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”—this line resonates in every era of polarization and moral exhaustion. The poem doesn’t predict a specific future; it captures the feeling of being between eras, when the old world is dying but the new one hasn’t yet been born. That liminal terror—that sense of something vast and terrible slouching toward us—is why we keep returning to this poem, reading it again and again, unable to shake it off.