Yeats's Second Coming

When WB Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1920, he was at the height of his career. He was an established literary figure in London and America. In Ireland he was an orchestrator, and active among the many literary movements whose works were coalescing into a distinctive Irish cultural identity. As co-founder, he was deeply involved in The Abbey Theatre. He was writing his Memoirs, assembling collections of his poetry, and composing his philosophy into “A Vision”. He would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

            At the same time, all around him, the world had moved through an age of conflict and was now recovering from the “Great War”. In Ireland, following the failed 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, and the execution of its leaders, the Republican cause had begun to gain widespread support among the people. After winning a landslide victory in the 1918 election the Irish Republican Party, Sinn Fein, formed a breakaway government and declared autonomy from British rule. The war of independence in Ireland had begun.

            In “The Second Coming”, Yeats addresses the global and national conflicts that marked the beginning of the twentieth century. In his philosophical understanding, human history was composed of a series of two-thousand-year cycles. The “widening gyre” of his opening line marks a point when an old order is collapsing and those who ought to be in command, the “falconer”, are losing control. War and anarchy become the norm as “The best lack all conviction, while the worst /Are full of passionate”. These first eight lines, following a conventional sonnet rhyming pattern, state a problem: the breakdown of law and order in the current phase of civilisation. Were this a conventional Italian sonnet, the next six lines would offer a resolution.

            However, Yeats, in the second part of the poem begins his sonnet again. He puts the problem another way and, replaces the original falcon/falconer political and social power structure with a new image. This second image, he explains, is drawn from Spiritus Mundi. In Yeats’s philosophy Spiritus Mundi is a vast receptacle of images generated through human and artistic thought from the beginning of time. This change of image locates the contemporary two-thousand-year Christian segment within the over-arching continuum of all human existence. The image represents a monolith coming to life; an unfolding animated horror that parallels the current worldwide state of conflict. This “rough beast” in the closing lines slouches toward the cradle of Christian civilisation, Bethlehem, to be born, or to be reborn, an anti-Christ. The nightmarish conclusion explains itself as the beginning of a new two-thousand-year cycle. In Yeats’s understanding of cyclical phases in civilisation, the wars across Europe, can be understood as portents of a new age.