Search results
The Second Coming. By William Butler Yeats. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 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; The best lack all conviction, while the worst.
"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 uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to describe allegorically the atmosphere of post-war Europe. It is considered a major work of modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry .
‘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 Second Coming. W. B. Yeats. 1865 –. 1939. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere.
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. (It is safe to say that very few people who love this poem could paraphrase its meaning to satisfaction.)
The Second Coming. William Butler Yeats. Track 12 on Michael Robartes and the Dancer. This poem was written in 1919, during the aftermath of the First World War, but it is a response to the...
