Lesson One: "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats

Hello, and welcome to the Poetry Palace. I’m your hostess, the Poetry Princess.

The idea behind the Poetry Palace goes back twenty years, when I took a poetry class during my freshman year of college. I continued to study poetry for several years after that.

When people asked what I studied and I told them, their reactions were often the same.

“Oh, poetry,” they would say. “I like it, but I’m not sure I get it.”

Well, I’m not sure I get it either. That’s sort of the point.

A poet I studied with, Mark Strand, once told our class, “Not everything is accounted for in poetry. In our society we consider it a sign of immaturity if you don't have yourself together. Poetry is that delicious state of having knowledge without being together.”

In other words, we might say that liking it but not being sure you get it is the very state of being when one is reading poetry.

Even among poets and poetry scholars, “knowing” what a poem means doesn’t feel the same as knowing what a newspaper article, an email, or even a short story means. There’s a different kind of meaning at work in poems, as Strand indicated, and I think it’s a discomfort with this kind of meaning that makes so many people feel like they “don’t get it,” even when they do in fact have some ideas about what a poem means.


There are many different types of poems, and many ways of classifying them. Poetry can be narrative, meaning it tells a story; or lyric, meaning it relies primarily on beautiful language and sensory images to convey its meaning. It may be formal, meaning it relies on recurring patterns and structure, such as rhyme, or the usage of meter—“BeCAUSE I COULD not STOP for DEATH”; or it may be free verse, meaning it does not rely on formal patterns to provide its shape.

But of course, there is overlap even among these categories. A narrative poem may include lyric images, and free verse has been part of the tradition of poetry for so long that it has its own conventions.

Here at the Poetry Palace, we’re going to spend time looking at some poems that have been influential and which are liked by the Poetry Princess (and which, the Princess hastens to add for anyone concerned about such things, are in the public domain.)

After I read each poem I’ll make some observations about it. These observations will not be exhaustive. There is plenty more to say about the poems beyond what I’ll say here. If you’re interested, you could look up what scholars have said about these poems. Or, you could say some things yourself, perhaps by forming a poetry appreciation group, or joining a writing workshop.

Here at the Poetry Palace, we love poems from all over the world, but to start with we’ll only be looking at poems written in English, since it’s the only language in which the Poetry Princess is fluent.

Well, that and the language of love, of course.

And pig Latin.


Our first lesson is on the poem “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats. Here is the poem.

The Second Coming

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
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats, an Irish poet, wrote this poem in 1919. The opening lines of the poem

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer

use an image from falconry. Falconry was a hobby pursued by members of the aristocracy in Europe and Asia. Therefore, by selecting this metaphor to start his poem, Yeats gives us a clue as to where his sympathies lie: with the elite, privileged class.

A gyre is a conical sphere, such as a dust devil, a whirlpool, or a serving of frozen custard.

“Gyres” are an important concept in a book called A Vision, which Yeats published a few years after the composition of this poem. The theory of history articulated in that book centers on a diagram composed of two conical spirals, or gyres, one situated inside the other, so that the widest part of one cone occupies the same plane as the tip of the other cone, and vice versa. Yeats claimed that the "gyres" captured contrary motions inherent within history, time, and even human nature.

Though it’s useful to know something about the personal theories of Yeats when reading this poem, most readers respond to the poem out of a tradition with which they’re more familiar, namely Christianity, a religion with a built-in preoccupation with eschatology, or the end of the world.

For a reader in 1919, it would perhaps be especially easy for thoughts to take an apocalyptic turn, with the millennium running down and World War I so recently ended. The Russian Revolution would also have been on the poet’s mind; thus his concern for the falconer in the opening lines, whose privileged status was threatened by world events.

These world events are the background against we read the remainder of the first stanza:

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
Are full of passionate intensity.

Remembering the aristocratic falconer of the opening lines, it’s worth noting that Yeats was not a poet of the people. He preferred the aristocracy to commoners, which again suggests that the closing lines of the stanza

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

may refer to the revolution in Russia, of which Yeats would not have been a fan.


However, it’s in the nature of great lines of poetry that we want to take them out of context and use them for our own ends, so that when I hear the lines

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I think of situations in the U.S. where bigots have carried the day.


Yeats opens the second stanza with a conclusion derived from the first stanza:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming is usually understood to refer to the return of Jesus Christ, a significant event in both Christianity and Islam.

However, the second stanza of Yeats’ poem doesn’t rely on Christian imagery at all. Rather, he invokes a different sort of image, one out of “Spiritus Mundi,” as he says:

… a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun …

“Spiritus Mundi” sounds like an established phrase, but in fact it is one of Yeats’ own invention. It’s Latin, translates as “Spirit of the World,” and refers to Yeats’ belief in a collective human unconscious.

Certainly the image he invokes is familiar to many; so familiar that it does seem as though it could spring from a collective unconscious. The “shape with lion body and the head of a man” is the Great Sphinx of Giza.

Our best estimates currently place construction of the Sphinx at approximately 2500 B.C.E. Thus it serves as an excellent counterpoint to the birth of Christ, which Yeats saw as the start of the current 2,000-year historical cycle.

In other words, approximately 4,000 years ago the Sphinx was built, and 2,000 years ago Christ was born, and in 1919 when Yeats is writing this poem, it’s time to prepare for the advent of the next cycle, which, according to his personal mythology, will be as foreign and hard to predict as the aftermath of Christ’s death would have been hard to predict for the Romans of Christ’s day.

The vision of the new cycle which the poet glimpses briefly is not especially reassuring. The falcon of stanza one has been replaced by “indignant desert birds,” probably buzzards, that circle around the sphinx, the creature that represents the new cycle. This creature is described in brutal terms: stony sleep, vexed to nightmare, rough beast.

And yet, though these images might read as alarming to us—readers who see their confirming counterparts in our nuclear nightmares about Iran and North Korea—in fact, literary critics tell us Yeats welcomed the changes represented by his slouching beast, and anticipated them with satisfaction.

Bearing all this in mind, let’s look at the poem one more time.

The Second Coming

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
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Power stuff, I hope you’ll agree!

I hope these comments will help you engage with and appreciate the poem more.

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