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- “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...
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- 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 prophesies that some sort of Second Coming is due, and that the anarchy that has arisen all around the world is a sign that this Second Coming cannot be far off. It refers to a shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, as a possible sign of something different from Christ. It also suggests that the centre cannot hold and that the world is in chaos.
Mar 15, 2021 · The Second Coming is a famous poem that depicts the vision of the Yeatsian apocalypse and the cyclic nature of history and culture. The poem explores the themes of the life and death of the individual, the conflict between objective and subjective impulses, and the role of the artist in a changing world.
W. B. Yeats was one of the most prominent Irish poets along with Seamus Heaney. Born in 1865, he began writing at the age of seventeen. The poem The Second Coming was published in his collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer in 1921. W. B. Yeats was influenced by the English Romantic Poets such as William Wordsworth, John Keats, and William ...
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Overview. “The Second Coming” is one of the best-known poems by the Anglo-Irish writer William Butler Yeats. He wrote the poem in 1919, at a time when his longstanding interest in mysticism began to influence his verse. The poem reveals a prophetic vision of the contrary forces at work in history, which periodically result in cataclysmic ...
