Search results
People also ask
What is a good summary of the Second Coming?
Who wrote the poem 'the Second Coming'?
What does the Second Coming mean in William Butler Yeats?
What does the second stanza of 'the Second Coming' mean?
- “The Second Coming” Summary.
- “The Second Coming” Themes. Civilization, Chaos, and Control. See where this theme is active in the poem. Morality and Christianity.
- 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; Lines 3-6.
- “The Second Coming” Symbols. The Falcon. See where this symbol appears in the poem. The Beast.
- Summary
- Analysis, Stanza by Stanza
- Historical Background
‘The Second Coming’ was William Butler Yeats’ ode to the era. Rife with Christian imagery, and pulling much inspiration from apocalyptic writing, Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’tries to put into words what countless people of the time felt: that it was the end of the world as they knew it and that nothing else would ever be the same again. The First Wor...
Stanza One
Much has been written on the apocalypse, and many of those writings focus on the harbingers of the event: it is always bloody and massive, a vicious explosion that shakes the world to its foundation. In Yeats’ poem, the apocalypse is a much quieter, more understated, affair. It opens up with the disturbance of nature. Falcons were used as hunting animals since the medieval era. They are incredibly smart, and dedicated to their trainers, responding immediately to any noise that their handler m...
Stanza Two
In the second stanza, the Biblical imagery takes over the visions of corrupted nature. 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’. By comparing it to the very nature that Yeats spoke about in the first part of the poem, he brings out the almost infallible quality of this beast: like nature, it feels no...
W.B. Yeats was an Irish poet born on the 13th of June, 1865. He is considered a largely Irish poet, although he ran in British literary circles as well, and he was a big part of the resurgence of Irish literature. In 1923, he was to win the Nobel Prize in Literature for his poetry, as the first Irishman. This was shortly after Ireland had finally g...
- Female
- Poetry Analyst
A summary of “The Second Coming” in William Butler Yeats's Yeats's Poetry. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of Yeats's Poetry and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.
Jan 11, 2016 · The poem, in summary, prophesies that some sort of Second Coming (traditionally, this is the return of Christ to Earth, as was promised in the New Testament) is due, and that the anarchy that has arisen all around the world (partly because of the events of the First World War, though the tumultuous events in Yeats’s home country of Ireland are a...
The poem describes a world full of chaos and disturbance in the beginning and the reader expects the return of Jesus Christ as it is predicted in the Bible that a bad stage will be followed by a good one. But as the poem progresses, we come to know that instead of Jesus Christ’s return, a beast arrives.
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.
The Second Coming Summary. "The Second Coming" is narrated by a speaker who is observing the world around him with horror. The poem begins with the phrase "Turning and turning in the widening gyre," a sentence that evokes an occult symbol that perpetually fascinated William Butler Yeats: interlocked circles.
