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The Second Coming Summary & Analysis
by William Butler Yeats

The Second Coming Summary & Analysis
by William Butler Yeats

  • Introduction
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
  • Symbols
  • Poetic Devices
  • Vocabulary & References
  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
  • Download PDF
  • Download Teacher Edition
  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Symbols
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
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The Full Text of “The Second Coming”

1Turning and turning in the widening gyre

2The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

3Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

4Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

5The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

6The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

7The best lack all conviction, while the worst

8Are full of passionate intensity.

9Surely some revelation is at hand;

10Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

11The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

12When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

13Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

14A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

15A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

16Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

17Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

18The darkness drops again; but now I know

19That twenty centuries of stony sleep

20Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

21And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

22Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The Full Text of “The Second Coming”

1Turning and turning in the widening gyre

2The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

3Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

4Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

5The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

6The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

7The best lack all conviction, while the worst

8Are full of passionate intensity.

9Surely some revelation is at hand;

10Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

11The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

12When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

13Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

14A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

15A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

16Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

17Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

18The darkness drops again; but now I know

19That twenty centuries of stony sleep

20Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

21And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

22Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  • “The Second Coming” Introduction

    • "The Second Coming" is one of W.B. Yeats's most famous poems. Written in 1919 soon after the end of World War I, it describes a deeply mysterious and powerful alternative to the Christian idea of the Second Coming—Jesus's prophesied return to the Earth as a savior announcing the Kingdom of Heaven. The poem's first stanza describes a world of chaos, confusion, and pain. The second, longer stanza imagines the speaker receiving a vision of the future, but this vision replaces Jesus's heroic return with what seems to be the arrival of a grotesque beast. With its distinct imagery and vivid description of society's collapse, "The Second Coming" is also one of Yeats's most quoted poems.

  • “The Second Coming” Summary

    • Flying around and around in a widening spiral, a falcon can no longer hear the call of its owner. Things are breaking down, and their foundation is giving way. Pure destruction and lawlessness have spread across the world, and so has a tidal wave darkened by blood. All the rituals of innocence have been swallowed by this tide. The best people aren't motivated to act, but the worst people are impassioned and eager.

      Some kind of revelation has to happen soon, and the Second Coming itself must be close. Excitedly, the speaker exclaims: "The Second Coming!" But just as the speaker says this, a vision comes to the speaker from the world's collective unconscious. The speaker sees a barren desert land, where a creature with a man's head and a lion's body is coming to life. Its expression is, like the sun, empty and without pity. Its legs are moving slowly, and all around it fly the shadows of disturbed desert birds. Everything becomes dark again, but the speaker knows something new: two thousand years of calm have been irreversibly disrupted by the shaking of a cradle. The speaker asks: what beast, whose time has finally come, is dragging itself towards Bethlehem, where it will be born.

  • “The Second Coming” Themes

    • Theme Civilization, Chaos, and Control

      Civilization, Chaos, and Control

      “The Second Coming” presents a nightmarish apocalyptic scenario, as the speaker describes human beings’ increasing loss of control and tendency towards violence and anarchy. Surreal images fly at the reader thick and fast, creating an unsettling atmosphere that suggests a world on the brink of destruction.

      Yet for all its metaphorical complexity, “The Second Coming” actually has a relatively simple message: it basically predicts that time is up for humanity, and that civilization as we know it is about to be undone. Yeats wrote this poem right after World War I, a global catastrophe that killed millions of people. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that the poem paints a bleak picture of humanity, suggesting that civilization’s sense of progress and order is only an illusion.

      With the above in mind, the first stanza’s challenging imagery starts to make more sense. The “falconer,” representing humanity’s attempt to control its world, has lost its “falcon” in the turning “gyre” (the gyre is an image Yeats uses to symbolize grand, sweeping historical movements as a kind of spiral). These first lines could also suggest how the modern world has distanced people from nature (represented here by the falcon). In any case, it’s clear that whatever connection once linked the metaphorical falcon and falconer has broken, and now the human world is spiraling into chaos.

      Indeed, the poem suggests that though humanity might have looked like it was making progress over the past “twenty centuries”—via seemingly ever-increasing knowledge and scientific developments, for example—the First World War proved people to be as capable of self-destruction as ever. “Anarchy” was “loosed upon the world,” along with tides of blood (which clearly evoke the mass death of war). “Innocence” was just a “ceremony,” now “drowned.” The “best” people lack “conviction,” which suggests they're not bothering to do anything about this nightmarish reality, while the “worst” people seem excited and eager for destruction. The current state of the world, according to the speaker, proves that the "centre"—that is, the foundation of society—was never very strong.

      In other words, humanity’s supposed arc of progress has been an illusion. Whether the poem means that humanity has lost its way or never knew it to begin with is unclear, but either way the promises of modern society—of safety, security, and human dignity—have proven empty. And in their place, a horrific creature has emerged—a grotesque perversion of the “Second Coming” promised by Christianity, during which Jesus Christ is supposed to return to the earth and invite true believers to heaven. This Second Coming is clearly not Jesus, but instead a “rough beast” that humanity itself has woken up (perhaps, the first stanza implies, by the incessant noise of its many wars).

      With this final image of the beast, the poem indicates that while humanity seemed to get more civilized in the 2,000 years that followed Christ's birth, in reality people have been sowing the seeds of their own destruction all along. This “rough beast” is now “pitilessly” slouching toward the birthplace of Jesus—likely in order to usher in a new age of “darkness” and “nightmare.”

    • Theme Morality and Christianity

      Morality and Christianity

      “The Second Coming” offers an unsettling take on Christian morality, suggesting that it is not the stable and reliable force that people believe it to be. The poem clearly alludes to the biblical Book of Revelation from the start, in which, put simply, Jesus returns to Earth to save the worthy. According to the Bible, this is meant to happen when humanity reaches the end times: an era of complete war, famine, destruction and hatred. The poem suggests that the end times are already happening, because humanity has lost all sense of morality—and perhaps that this morality was only an illusion to begin with.

      In the first stanza, the speaker describes the chaos, confusion, and moral weakness that have caused “things” to “fall apart.” In the second, the poem makes it clear that it’s a specifically Christian morality that is being undone. In describing this wide-ranging destruction, the poem asks whether Christian morality was built on weak foundations in the first place—that is, perhaps humanity was never really moral, but just pretended to be.

      The first stanza's imagery develops this sense of morality being turned upside down: good and evil (the "best" and "worst") are no longer the reliable categories that they once were, replaced by “mere anarchy” (“mere” means something like “pure” here). Humanity has drenched itself in blood—the “blood-dimmed tide”—suggesting that morality was only ever a “ceremony,” a performance that conjured the illusion that humankind was "innocent."

      What's more, the poem suggests that no one—not even Jesus—can remedy this bleak reality. The biblical Book of Revelation predicts a kind of final reckoning in which people essentially get what they deserve based on their moral behavior and religious virtues; it indicates that Jesus will come to save those who are worthy of being saved. But “The Second Coming” offers no such comfort.

      Instead, in the first line of the second stanza the poem hints that a moment of divine intervention must be at hand after the chaos of the first stanza ("surely some revelation is at hand"). And, as it turns out, "some revelation" is at hand. But rather than returning the world to peace, this new revelation makes things worse: a new and grotesque beast heads toward Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus, to be brought into the world. If Jesus was the figurehead for a moral movement, this new beastly leader is the figurehead of a new world of “anarchy,” in which the “best” people (likely the most moral people) lack the courage of their convictions and the “worst” are allowed to thrive. In other words, the poem portrays Christian morality and prophecy as weak, or even proven false, in the face of the violence and destruction that humans have created.

      The “blank gaze” of this new creature provides further evidence of just how hopeless the situation is. This being might have the head of a “man,” but it doesn’t have moral sense—instead, it is “pitiless.” It is arriving to preside over “blood-dimmed tide[s]” and “drowned’ “innocence”—not a world of kindness, charity, and justice. Its sphinx-like appearance is also deliberately at odds with Christian imagery, which further suggests a break with Christian morality. Meanwhile, the “Spiritus Mundi” mentioned by the poem is what Yeats thought of as the world’s collective unconscious, from which the poet could draw insight. This vision of the beast, then, is suggestive of a worldwide shift into “anarchy,” as the collective mind of humanity lets go of morality.

      “The Second Coming” is a deeply ambiguous poem. Indeed, Yeats revised specific cultural references out of the poem before its publication. But there’s no mistaking that this is a bleak vision of the future of humankind, one which presents morality as a kind of collective dream that is now turning into a nightmare.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Second Coming”

    • Lines 1-2

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

      The poem opens with a mysterious metaphor: a "falconer" searches for his lost falcon within a "widening gyre." The bird itself can't hear the falconer, perhaps because of the way that the surroundings are "widening."

      Here, it's important to know a little bit about Yeats's "System" of seeing the world (outlined in his book A Vision). He conceived of history as a kind of movement of "gyres," which are shapes like cone spirals or vortexes. According to Yeats, each phase of history is in contrary motion against the next, in a dimension that is essentially beyond the limits of human understanding. The poem conceives of the 20th century as the point when one gyre of history—the "twenty centuries" of Christianity and "progress"—gives way to another. This new era is altogether harder to define, but it looks ominous. The image of the falconer—the human—losing control over his environment (represented by the "falcon") symbolizes this shift from one phase of history to the next.

      Both opening lines use close repetition of words to create a sense of disorientation, as the falcon turns repeatedly in search of its master. The diacope of "turning" and the polyptoton of "falcon and "falconer" suggests repeated and increasingly desperate movement. The heavy /n/ consonance contributes to this effect too:

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

      The speaker's tone is notably measured and detached in the opening, suggesting little of the nightmarish vision to come in the second stanza. That said, the poem has now introduced its central premise of a loss of control, and though the poem's meaning is ambiguous, it seems likely that this loss of control is humanity's over its civilizations.

    • Lines 3-6

      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;

    • Lines 7-8

      The best lack all conviction, while the worst
      Are full of passionate intensity.

    • Lines 9-13

      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:

    • Lines 13-17

      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.

    • Lines 18-20

      The darkness drops again; but now I know
      That twenty centuries of stony sleep
      Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

    • Lines 21-22

      And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
      Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

  • “The Second Coming” Symbols

    • Symbol The Falcon

      The Falcon

      Yeats places the falcon front and center in the opening lines of the poem to represent humanity's control over the world. The fact that the falcon "cannot hear" its master thus symbolizes a loss of that control.

      To understand this symbol better, it's important to know a little bit about falconry more generally. Falconry is a practice that goes back thousands of years, and involves people training birds of prey to follow instructions. This was often for hunting purposes, but is also practiced as a kind of art form. In both instances, the falcon represents humanity exerting a type of intelligent control over the natural world. Killer birds like hawks and falcons are brought under the spell of humans.

      The falcon's inability to hear the falconer's call (lines 1 and 2) means that the relationship between them has been severed. This symbolizes chaos and confusion, and specifically gestures towards a breakdown in communication.

      The latter of these is especially interesting when considered in the context of World War I. The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which triggered the events that led to global conflict, is thought to have been partly due to his motorcade taking a wrong turn—because the driver had not been given the correct instruction.

    • Symbol The Beast

      The Beast

      In lines 11 to 18, the speaker has a vision of a beast. Though the speaker doesn't name the beast specifically, it is described in vivid and unsettling detail. The beast has a "lion body" and the "head of a man." This makes it similar to a sphinx or a manticore, both of which were mythical creatures said to be predatory towards humans. This type of hybrid creature is quite common in various mythologies, and is meant to convey a kind of freakishness, a sense of nature somehow going wrong.

      With its animal body and human head, perhaps this beast says something about the "nightmare" to come. Though humans have tried to civilize themselves and improve their world, perhaps their more beastly animal nature has only been hidden—not defeated.

      In other words, the beast might symbolize that civilization itself is a kind of illusion. The human head has a "gaze" that lacks empathy, suggesting that the beast is ready to kill. Given that the poem was written between the two world wars of the 20th century, this surreal image seems to gesture towards humankind's ever-improving capacity for self-destruction.

  • “The Second Coming” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Alliteration

      "The Second Coming" uses alliteration sparingly throughout. It is first used in the opening three lines, with repetition of the /t/ and /f/ sounds:

      Turning and turning in the widening gyre
      The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
      Things fall apart;

      This opening image is focused on disorientation, and the alliteration furthers the idea of repeated, confused movement. The falcon and the falconer have been separated, neither able to locate the other, and the scattered /f/ sound shows that they can't bridge the gap that separates them.

      The next notable example of alliteration comes in line 13, as the speaker describes the vision that came from the Spiritus Mundi. The speaker starts by setting the scene, and that's where the alliteration comes in:

      Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

      The alliterative /s/ sounds have a sibilant, whispering kind of sound that conjures up the howling winds of an inhospitable desert. This sense of atmosphere makes the beast that turns out to live in the desert seem all the more ominous.

      The poem then dials up the alliteration as it draws to its conclusion:

      Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
      And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
      Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

      The /r/ sounds link "rocking," "rough," and "round" together, creating an atmosphere of threat and potential violence. The four /b/ sounds in the last two lines build the sense of something taking to shape, as though the beast is growing in strength as the poem comes to its conclusion.

    • Allusion

    • Antithesis

    • Anaphora

    • Assonance

    • Caesura

    • Consonance

    • Enjambment

    • Epistrophe

    • Metaphor

    • Rhetorical Question

    • Diacope

  • "The Second Coming" Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Gyre
    • Falcon/Falconer
    • Anarchy
    • Loosed
    • Blood-dimmed
    • Revelation
    • Second Coming
    • Spiritus Mundi
    • Pitiless
    • Reel
    • Indignant
    • Vexed
    • Slouches
    • Bethlehem

    • A gyre is a spiral cone shape and part of Yeats's complicated view of mysterious historical forces. As one gyre of history gives way, another one takes over. The concept of the gyre is discussed in more detail in Yeats's A Vision.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Second Coming”

    • Form

      "The Second Coming" has two stanzas, with eight and fourteen lines respectively. The form does not fit any standard scheme. That said, both stanzas bear a slight resemblance to the sonnet form (an octet followed by a sestet). The first stanza is an octet, and the second does have the same number of lines as a sonnet. This is pretty much where the similarities end, and it's hard to know whether Yeats intended the form as a gesture toward sonnets. If he did, perhaps this slight resemblance could be Yeats's way of suggesting a break with tradition ("the centre cannot hold"). Perhaps the poem strives to be contained in sonnet form, but the force of the vision and the beast itself are too much to contend with, so the form breaks down.

      In terms of the two stanzas, they do serve very different functions. The first is written in an objective and measured tone, despite the "anarchy" and apparent misery it describes. In a way, it's like a news bulletin for the apocalypse.

      The poem enters its second phase at the start of stanza two, when the speaker appeals to some absent authority. "Surely," the speaker says, the Second Coming is due (given the dire situation that's been outlined in the previous stanza). This new, more personal perspective marks a shift into the speaker's subjective voice, making it seem as though this second stanza is an individual commentary on the general facts of the first stanza. Then, the speaker is essentially interrupted by their own vision, and lines 13 to 17 spell that vision out in unsettling detail.

      In line 18, the vision disappears, but the speaker is left with the vivid memory of it. Now, the speaker doesn't know the precise nature of what will happen in the future, but the speaker nonetheless senses that a significant shift in the world is coming—and it isn't going to be a good one. The poem thus ends on a note of doubt and fear, leaving the reader with the cliffhanger of the beast's slow approach.

    • Meter

      "The Second Coming" is written in blank verse, which is unrhymed iambic pentameter. Iambic pentameter follows a ba BUM rhythm with five poetic feet, for a total of ten syllables per line. But in this poem, the regularity of the meter is constantly under threat, especially in the second stanza.

      The first stanza is the much more measured—in tone and meter—of the two. Lines 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8—five out of eight lines—fit the metrical scheme well enough. But the poem in fact starts with metrical variation, hinting at the picture of chaos and confusion that is to come:

      Turning | and turn- | ing in | the wid- | ening gyre
      The fal- | con can- | not hear | the fal- | -coner;

      The meter of both lines to a degree depends on how they are pronounced: whether "widening" and "falconer" are said with two or three syllables. Either way, the poem begins with a trochee instead of an iamb, and the possible extra syllables make the lines feel as though they are under metrical pressure. This effect is used to create an atmosphere of confusion, as though the lines want to be regular but have been destabilized.

      The start of the second stanza has a similar effect, with trochees instead of iambs at the start of lines 9 and 10. This places extra emphasis on both instances of the word "Surely," reinforcing the speaker's exasperation at the apparent failure of the (Christian) Second Coming to arrive.

      The most unstable section, metrically speaking, is the vision itself. Lines 13 through 17 contain some iambs, but the number of syllables per line varies wildly and the stresses are inconsistent. Here, it is as though the beast in the speaker's mind is testing the boundaries of the poem's cage, pushing and straining at the metrical edges:

      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.

      Throughout, the tension between the regular meter and the frequent substitutions brings to life the sense of barely-contained chaos that the poem describes.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      "The Second Coming" doesn't have a discernible rhyme scheme. The first four lines almost rhyme in couplets—"gyre"/"falconer" and "hold"/"world"—but not quite. Considering that the poem seeks to paint a picture of a chaotic world in which the "centre cannot hold," it makes sense that it doesn't employ strong end rhymes. A clear rhyme scheme would probably suggest order and pattern, rather than disorder and array, so the lack of rhyme underscores just how broken this world of "anarchy" really is.

      Technically speaking, lines 9 and 10 rhyme, but that is because they end in the same word. This is an example of epistrophe, emphasizing how close the speaker feels the Second Coming is—or rather, how close they feel it ought to be, given the chaos portrayed in the first stanza.

  • “The Second Coming” Speaker

    • The identity of the speaker is not specified in "The Second Coming." However, the poem does offer a few clues as to speaker's perspective.

      First, it's important to notice the clear difference in tone between stanza 1 and stanza 2. The opening stanza has no intervention that makes the speaker's role obvious—there are no first-person pronouns, nor do there seem to be any subjective opinions expressed. The first stanza reads more like a kind of weird news bulletin, listing all the chaos, confusion, and misery in the world (and doing so only in the most general terms). The only thing that suggests that the first stanza may not be entirely objective is the use of the word "gyre," which is a mystical/philosophical idea from Yeats's own "System" (which, for those interested, is outlined in Yeats's A Vision).

      The second stanza begins with an important shift in the speaker's role in the poem. Suddenly, the speaker is introducing their own subjective opinion, crying out that it must "surely" be time for "revelation" and the "Second Coming." Indeed, the repeated "surely" and "Second Coming" suggest an air of desperation, which is reinforced by the exclamation mark caesura of line 11. In lines 13 through 18, the speaker receives an image from the world's collective unconscious ("Spiritus Mundi"). This vision seems to be a premonition, which the speaker then comments on in lines 18 through 22, ending on a grim note as the beast from the vision makes its way toward reality.

      The speaker is thus a kind of visionary, someone who can interpret the chaos of the first stanza and offer some clue about what it means (even though much of its meaning remains a mystery). The speaker also seems to have some alignment with the Christian moral and mythical framework, and it is the collapse of the Christian world ("twenty centuries of stony sleep") that they seem to foresee.

  • “The Second Coming” Setting

    • The setting in "The Second Coming" is deliberately disorientating and abstract, in the first stanza at least.

      The poem opens with a metaphorical image—the separated falcon and falconer—within a "widening gyre." This "gyre" is more of a philosophical idea than a concrete location, meaning that the poem's opening is quite difficult to place. Indeed, according to Yeats's own beliefs, these "gyres" are huge spiral shapes that represent the major movements of history (e.g. "twenty centuries" of Christianity), and so accordingly the setting is as generic as simply "the world." The rest of the stanza builds this general sense of "anarchy," chaos, and misery, but it resists tying it to one place or time.

      The poem was, of course, written just after the end of World War I, so it's easy to read the early 20th century into the poem too. The mention of "twenty centuries" also seems to confirm that this is the 20th century (twenty centuries after the birth of Jesus Christ), even if it's a nightmarish and abstract version of it.

      The setting in the second stanza gets more specific but even weirder. The reader is suddenly brought into the subjective experience of the speaker, who in turn is receiving a vision from the Spiritus Mundi (Yeats's term for humanity's collective unconscious). This vision is situated in a barren, inhospitable desert. Eventually, the speaker comes out of this vision and imagines the beast (or perhaps another similarly nightmarish one) in a new location: the path to Bethlehem. According to Christianity, Bethlehem was the birthplace of Jesus Christ, and in geographic terms, it's located in modern-day Palestine.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “The Second Coming”

    • Literary Context

      Along with Seamus Heaney, William Butler Yeats is one of Ireland's most prominent poets. He was born in 1865 and began writing around the age of seventeen, and this poem appears in his 1921 collection, Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Yeats's influences were wide and diverse, including the English Romantics—figures such as Wordsworth, Blake, and Keats—and the French Symbolists, such as Stephen Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud. Irish mythology and folklore were also especially formative of his work, particularly given his desire for Ireland's political independence from England.

      Yeats was also interested in mysticism and the occult. This poem demonstrates that interest, using the "gyre" image that Yeats discusses in A Vision, a wide-ranging book that outlines Yeats's "System" ( a complicated mix of different philosophies and cultural ideas). Yeats believed in a kind of collective unconscious of humankind (the "Spiritus Mundi"), from which powerful (but not necessarily easy to understand) images and symbols could be gathered by poets. His wife at the time, Georgie Hyde-Lees, was instrumental in this aspect of Yeats's work, acting as a psychic channel through which Yeats believed he could find spiritually valid poetic ideas.

      Additionally, there is one key literary influence running through this poem from start to finish: the biblical Book of Revelation (and the Bible more generally). In the Book of Revelation, Jesus is predicted to return to the Earth (in what's called "The Second Coming") and usher in a new era of peace, joy, and union with God. This poem is a kind of perversion of that story, seeing a bizarre beast in place of the expected hero. The author of the Book of Revelation names himself as John of Patmos, but the book's genuine authorship and its relationship to the rest of the Bible are the subject of much scholarly debate. The book itself is full of surreal imagery and prophecy and well worth a read.

      Historical Context

      Though "The Second Coming" deliberately avoids being too specific about its setting, most critics see the date of composition as significant. It was written soon after the end of World War I, during which millions of people died in battle and millions more from its fallout. This immense devastation was a stark reminder of humanity's capacity for self-destruction. Indeed, some people see the poem as an eery prediction of World War II, in part because Adolf Hitler so clearly matches the poem's idea of the "worst" people who are "full of passionate intensity."

      But the historical context as actually presented by the poem is much more ambiguous. In its discussion of what looks like an end-of-the-world scenario, the poem is partly a work of eschatology—that is, writing about the apocalypse. As such, the poem joins a historical tradition that stretches back thousands of years. Indeed, an Assyrian clay tablet dated around 2800 BC talks of a "degenerate Earth" showing "signs that the world is speedily coming to an end."

      Despite its lack of specifics, the poem is definitely grounded in Christian theology and history. The "Second Coming," though not an idea exclusive to Christianity, is definitely strongly associated with that religion. Indeed, the "twenty centuries" of line 19 and the mention of Bethlehem seem to confirm the poem's ties to Christianity, as both refer to the birth of Jesus Christ.

  • More “The Second Coming” Resources

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