“The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats

"The Second Coming" , by William Butler Yeats

             Listen: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/play/77066

Turning and turning in the widening  gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the center 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 of lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze; blank and pitiless as the sun, it 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?

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DEFINITIONS

gyre  - a spiral. pronounced with a hard 'g' as in girl.

anarchy - can mean many things. Here it just means disarray and disorder.

conviction - a firmly held belief or opinion.

Spiritus Mundi - the collective spirit of mankind, literally "World Soul"

Lion body and the head of a man - an Egyptian Sphynx

reel - lose one's balance and stagger or lurch violently.

indignant - feeling anger at what is perceived as unfair treatment.

vexed - can mean many things. Here it means frustrated

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Explanatory notes:
"The Second Coming" is considered a major work of modernist poetry.

Modernists read "The Second Coming" as a dirge for the decline of civilization, but it also expresses Yeats's apocalyptic mystical theories and is shaped by the 1890s

The speaker describes a nightmarish scene:
Surely, the speaker asserts, the world is near a revelation;

No sooner does he think of “the Second Coming,” then he is troubled by “a vast image of the Spiritus Mundi", somewhere in the desert, a giant Sphinx Σφίγξ comes.

the Egyptian sphinx, man/lion (an androsphinx : Ανδρόσφιγξ ).
is viewed as benevolent (well meaning and kindly.), 
but having a ferocious strength 
Used as guardians to the entrances of temples.

Commentary
Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, “The Second Coming” is one of Yeats’s most famous and most anthologized poems; it is also one of the most thematically obscure and difficult to understand.

the second stanza surmises that a monstrous Second Coming is about to take place, not of the Jesus we first knew, but of

• A new messiah
• A “rough beast”
• A sphinx rousing itself in the desert and lumbering toward Bethlehem.

Yeats spent years crafting an elaborate, mystical theory of the universe that he described in his book A Vision.
This theory issued in part from Yeats’s lifelong fascination with the occult and mystical, and in part from the sense of responsibility Yeats felt to order his experience within a structured belief system.

footnotes:
The system is extremely complicated and not of any lasting importance—except for the effect that it had on his poetry, which is of extraordinary lasting importance.

The theory of history Yeats articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram made of two conical spirals, one inside the other, so that the widest part of one of the spirals rings around the narrowest part of the other spiral, and vice versa.

 

Yeats believed that this image captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process, and he divided each gyre into specific regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods.

“The Second Coming” was intended by Yeats to describe the current historical moment (the poem appeared in 1921) in terms of these gyres.
Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre and began moving along the inner gyre.

In his definitive edition of Yeats’s poems, Richard J. Finneran quotes Yeats’s own notes:
"The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to its place of greatest contraction... The revelation [that] approaches will... take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre..."

In other words, the world’s trajectory along the gyre of science, democracy, and heterogeneity is now coming apart, like the frantically widening flight-path of the falcon that has lost contact with the falconer;
the next age will take its character not from the gyre of science, democracy, and speed, but from the contrary inner gyre—which, presumably, opposes mysticism, primal power, and slowness to the science and democracy of the outer gyre.

The “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem is the symbol of this new age; the speaker’s vision of the rising sphinx is his vision of the character of the new world.