- The Poem
- Notes on Context
- Notes on Form
- Notes on Content
- Commentary and Quotations
The first stanza of “The Second Coming” is a powerful description of apocalypse, opening with the indelible image of the falcon circling ever higher, in ever-widening spirals, so far that “The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” The centrifugal impetus described by those circles in the air tends to chaos and disintegration -- “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;” -- and more than chaos and disintegration, to war -- “The blood-dimmed tide” -- to fundamental doubt -- “The best lack all conviction” -- and to the rule of misguided evil -- “the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
The centrifugal impetus of those widening circles in the air, however, is no parallel to the Big Bang theory of the universe, in which everything speeding away from everything else finally dissipates into nothingness. In Yeats’ mystical/philosophical theory of the world, in the scheme he outlined in his book A Vision, the gyres are intersecting cones, one widening out while the other focuses in to a single point. History is not a one-way trip into chaos, and the passage between the gyres not the end of the world altogether, but a transition to a new world, or to another dimension.
The second section of the poem offers a glimpse into the nature of that next, new world: It is a sphinx -- “a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi... / A shape with lion body and the head of a man” -- therefore it is not only a myth combining elements of our known world in new and unknown ways, but also a fundamental mystery, and fundamentally alien -- “A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” It does not answer the questions posed by the outgoing domain -- therefore the desert birds disturbed by its rising, representing the inhabitants of the existing world, the emblems of the old paradigm, are “indignant.” It poses its own new questions, and so Yeats must end his poem with the mystery, his question: “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
It has been said that the essence of great poems is their mystery, and that is certainly true of “The Second Coming.” It is a mystery, it describes a mystery, it offers distinct and resonant images, but opens itself to infinite layers of interpretation.
