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"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.
May 16, 2024 · Yeats believed that history is cyclical, and “The Second Coming”—a two-stanza poem in blank verse —with its imagery of swirling chaos and terror, prophesies the cataclysmic end of an era.
In Yeats's "The Second Coming," "gyre" is used to represent the swirling, turning landscape of life itself. Gyres apper in many of Yeats's poems. He uses it to represent the systems that make up life, the push-pulls between freedom and control that spin together to create existence.
For Yeats, however, the word “gyre”—which he pronounced with a hard G sound—had additional symbolic significance. His longstanding fascination with mysticism led him to elaborate his own theory of history.
Jan 11, 2016 · ‘The Second Coming’ is one of W. B. Yeats’s best-known poems, and its meaning has eluded many readers because of its oblique references and ambiguous images. What follows is a short summary and analysis of the poem.
From the start, Yeats ties his poem to religion by stating ‘the Second Coming is at hand’, and conjuring up a picture of a creature with a lion’s body and a man’s head, much like the sphynx, and a gaze as ‘blank and pitiless as the sun’.
For the symbolism of “The Second Coming,” Yeats drew heavily on his own mystical theory of history. He illustrated this theory with a diagram made of two spirals. These spirals, which Yeats called “gyres,” are arranged so that the widest part of one spiral circles the narrowest part of the other.
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.
Mar 15, 2021 · Yeats punctuates the entire discussion by quoting “The Second Coming’s” description of the sphinx, the physical and mythic symbol of the “antithetical influx” he describes.
"The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920 and included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to describe allegorically the atmosphere of post-war Europe . [2]
