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William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, during the Modern literary period and shortly after World War I ended. It was published in 1920 in a prominent literary magazine called The Dial. In his poem, Yeats uses the Christian belief in the Second Coming of Christ as a metaphor for the dismal state of post-war Europe. The ...
Mar 15, 2021 · One of the most famous poems in the English language, The Second Coming is the definitive vision of the Yeatsian apocalypse. It incorporates and intensifies ideas of cyclic creation and destruction already articulated in poems like “The Magi,” “On Woman,” “The Phases of the Moon,” and “Solomon and the Witch,” and more obliquely anticipated by…
Nov 6, 2023 · To grasp the significance of "The Second Coming," one must understand the poem's opening line. The "widening gyre" is more than just the falcon's spiraling flight—it's part of Yeats's view of ...
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,
Nov 21, 2023 · ''The Second Coming'' is a poem by Irish poet William Butler Yeats, often styled as W.B. Yeats. Yeats lived from 1865 to 1939, and his father was a famous Irish painter named John Butler Yeats ...
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.
Summary. William Butler Yeats 's "The Second Coming" is a short poem that blisters with apocalyptic ominousness. Its first line, "turning and turning in the widening gyre," locates the whole poem inside an expanding gyre, or spiral, making it clear that something is moving and changing, and the world will never be the same.
