The Second Coming Name of University by William Butler Yeats

Running head: ENGLISH
The Second Coming
Name of the Student:
Name of University:
Author Note

2
ENGLISH
William Butler Yeats is considered to be the most accomplished poet of the twentieth
century who wrote in English. He is well known for being able to compose his writing
concerning the everyday and mundane with the grandiose. The Second Coming is considered to
be one of the most famous poems created by him and bear great significance too. Yeats is highly
regarded by critics as well as readers. Yeats is famous as a dramatist an Irish Metaphysic poet
(Khader). He is the father of the symbolist movement and won the Nobel Prize for literature in
1923. The gloom and foreboding of the bloodshed can be traced in his poems. He was the
greatest figure of the first half of the twentieth century without having to resort to any kind of
controversy through his poetic representations or otherwise (Didi, Gaboussa, and Mouna). The
thesis of this paper is to analyze The Second Coming with respect to some portions of the poem,
through discussion.
The Second Coming underlines the world scenarios which were triggered by religion and
thus employs the theme of cataclysm. The name of the poem, The Second Coming is suggestive
of the theme and the content which Yeats has offered in the poem. Ye the theme of the poem is
abstract in the subject matter (Khader). It bears timeless symbols and imaginations which
resonate of the modern world which has been claimed by several scholars to link the Irish
historical and –political turmoil along with the Russian too. It also haunts the readers because of
the silence which can be heard before the storm, i.e., the World War II, especially because Yeats
had already witnessed the First World War and its destructive force on the face of Earth
(Khader). It this offers a self-declared vision of the cataclysmic events which have preceded
earlier and he dreaded for succeeding in the future too. Twentieth century, has been captured as
that precise moment which the world is chaotic and the poem stands as the anthem for demise
and degeneration in the world.

3
ENGLISH
The poem is divided into two sections. The first section comprises of eight lines which
talk about the futility of the modern society and barrenness of the world (Malins, Edward, and
Purkis). However, the first four lines capture sets a setting of dissatisfaction which the poet has
been feeling while writing the poem and talking about world order.
“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 very first line of the poem, bear metaphor of a gyre which is spinning. Gyres usually
have a form which is circular in form, very much like the shape of a tornado or a vortex. Gyres
have two cones which converge and meet internally. In the lines, Yeats make a comparison of
civilization to that a gyre in rotational motion. Yeats’ dissatisfaction become very prominent as
he hints at spirituality and morality being erased from the modern society (Saxena). The readers
can understand from the tonality, which has been employed by Yeats that faith and innocence are
gone, while the world has been taken over by chaos and turmoil. The lines present a picture
which is realistic and nihilistic, resonating the philosophy of Nietzsche as if God is dead from the
world (Ehrmantraut).
The gyre which Yeats talk about, in his poem is so vast that it can contain in itself, a
falcon as well as a falconer. Yeats has presented the gyre which has the size of the world. The
falcon and falconer serve as a metaphor in the poem, for the distance and disorder, which he
fears, is approaching (Rajan). The announcement of Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,
which is a bold as he states that the center is losing hold of order and doom is near as it will all