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One of the most famous poems in the English language, “The Second Coming” is the definitive vision of the Yeatsian apocalypse. It incorporates and intensifies ideas of cyclic creation and destruction already articulated in poems like “The Magi,” “On Woman,” “The Phases of the Moon,” and “Solomon and the Witch,” and more obliquely anticipated by “Easter 1916” (“All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born”). In its unsettling concatenation of images and startling revision of Christian doctrine, the poem finds the sufficient formula for genuine mythmaking and in this respect goes beyond a poem like “The Phases of the Moon,” which, as Yeats admits, has the abstract quality of a “text for exposition”
The underlying “mathematical figure” of “The Second Coming,” as Yeats states in a lengthy note to the poem, is the cone or gyre interlocked with its opposite, the vertex of the one centered upon the base of the other. This figure defines the relation not only between subjective and objective impulses within the individual, but also within the pattern of history. The end of an age, Yeats explains, “always receives the revelation of the character of the next age” and “is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction. At the present moment the life gyre [i.e., the objective or primary impulse] is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ which was narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest expansion. The revelation which approaches will however take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre [i.e., the subjective or antithetical impulse].
In its first stanza, “The Second Coming” envisions just this “expansion” of the “life gyre” in the figure of the falcon circling in a widening gyre beyond the command of the falconer, an image that Yeats had rehearsed in the fine minor poem “The Hawk” (1916). The image reverses the beatific downward gyre of the white gull in “Demon and Beast,” such that the two poems in conjunction embody the double movement of the gyres as each dies into the life of the other. The image also reprises the central image of the “The Wild Swans at Coole,” the private bereavement of the earlier poem writ large as a symbol of universal dissolution, of anarchy “loosed upon the world,” of the “blood-dimmed tide” drowning everywhere “the ceremony of innocence.” This is something like the ceremony of innocence that Yeats wishes for his daughter in “A Prayer for My Daughter,” which immediately follows in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) and in the collected poems.
The second stanza, echoing the desert scene in the final stanza of “Demon and Beast,” stages the vision of destruction by which modernity is to be undone. Convinced that the “second com- ing” must be at hand, for the condition of the culture is unsustainable, Yeats sees “a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi,” or the “world spirit,” a version of the AniMA MunDi that is a central concept in Yeats’s esoteric philosophy. in his notes to Lady gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920), Yeats attributes the concept of the “spiritus mundi” to the Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–87) and describes it as a pervasive vital spirit that contains “all forms, so that the parents when a child is begotten, or a witch when the double is projected as a hare, but as it were, call upon the Spiritus Mundi for the form they need” . in a note to “an image from a past life,” Yeats describes the Spiritus Mundi as a “general storehouse of images which have ceased to be a property of any personality or spirit” . in this case, the mind’s eye calls forth from the Spiritus Mundi a desert scene in which 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 above “reel shadows of the indignant desert birds,” as if the noble, solitary falcon of the opening stanza has been reborn as its anti-self.
The image of the sphinx had germinated for decades, inspired perhaps, as Harold Bloom and stallworthy think, by shelley’s “ozymandias,” with its related vision: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk a shattered visage lies . . .” (Yeats 319; Between the Lines 22 – 23). in Autobiographies, Yeats recalls an occult experiment that took place in 1890 or 1891 in which macgregor mathers induced a vision clearly anticipatory of the sphinx of “The second Coming.” Yeats saw “a desert and a black Titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap of ancient ruins”.
In its chilling final lines, “The second Coming” crossbreeds its dark cyclic vision with the tra- ditional Christian mythos of the second coming (see Matthew 24) and revelation (see Revelation 13). Like some mutant Christ, the rough beast, “its hour come round at last,” slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, not in initiation of a final heavenly peace, but in perpetuation of the violent revolutions of history and in annunciation of the birth of a new age, as in “The Magi” (“round” in this case has a literal signification). as Richard Ellmann writes, “The final intimation that the new god will be born in Bethlehem, which Christianity associates with passive infancy and the tenderness of maternal love, makes it brutishness particularly frightful” .
The underlying “mathematical figure” of “The Second Coming,” as Yeats states in a lengthy note to the poem, is the cone or gyre interlocked with its opposite, the vertex of the one centered upon the base of the other. This figure defines the relation not only between subjective and objective impulses within the individual, but also within the pattern of history. The end of an age, Yeats explains, “always receives the revelation of the character of the next age” and “is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction. At the present moment the life gyre [i.e., the objective or primary impulse] is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ which was narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest expansion. The revelation which approaches will however take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre [i.e., the subjective or antithetical impulse].
In its first stanza, “The Second Coming” envisions just this “expansion” of the “life gyre” in the figure of the falcon circling in a widening gyre beyond the command of the falconer, an image that Yeats had rehearsed in the fine minor poem “The Hawk” (1916). The image reverses the beatific downward gyre of the white gull in “Demon and Beast,” such that the two poems in conjunction embody the double movement of the gyres as each dies into the life of the other. The image also reprises the central image of the “The Wild Swans at Coole,” the private bereavement of the earlier poem writ large as a symbol of universal dissolution, of anarchy “loosed upon the world,” of the “blood-dimmed tide” drowning everywhere “the ceremony of innocence.” This is something like the ceremony of innocence that Yeats wishes for his daughter in “A Prayer for My Daughter,” which immediately follows in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) and in the collected poems.
The second stanza, echoing the desert scene in the final stanza of “Demon and Beast,” stages the vision of destruction by which modernity is to be undone. Convinced that the “second com- ing” must be at hand, for the condition of the culture is unsustainable, Yeats sees “a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi,” or the “world spirit,” a version of the AniMA MunDi that is a central concept in Yeats’s esoteric philosophy. in his notes to Lady gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland (1920), Yeats attributes the concept of the “spiritus mundi” to the Cambridge Platonist Henry More (1614–87) and describes it as a pervasive vital spirit that contains “all forms, so that the parents when a child is begotten, or a witch when the double is projected as a hare, but as it were, call upon the Spiritus Mundi for the form they need” . in a note to “an image from a past life,” Yeats describes the Spiritus Mundi as a “general storehouse of images which have ceased to be a property of any personality or spirit” . in this case, the mind’s eye calls forth from the Spiritus Mundi a desert scene in which 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 above “reel shadows of the indignant desert birds,” as if the noble, solitary falcon of the opening stanza has been reborn as its anti-self.
The image of the sphinx had germinated for decades, inspired perhaps, as Harold Bloom and stallworthy think, by shelley’s “ozymandias,” with its related vision: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk a shattered visage lies . . .” (Yeats 319; Between the Lines 22 – 23). in Autobiographies, Yeats recalls an occult experiment that took place in 1890 or 1891 in which macgregor mathers induced a vision clearly anticipatory of the sphinx of “The second Coming.” Yeats saw “a desert and a black Titan raising himself up by his two hands from the middle of a heap of ancient ruins”.
In its chilling final lines, “The second Coming” crossbreeds its dark cyclic vision with the tra- ditional Christian mythos of the second coming (see Matthew 24) and revelation (see Revelation 13). Like some mutant Christ, the rough beast, “its hour come round at last,” slouches toward Bethlehem to be born, not in initiation of a final heavenly peace, but in perpetuation of the violent revolutions of history and in annunciation of the birth of a new age, as in “The Magi” (“round” in this case has a literal signification). as Richard Ellmann writes, “The final intimation that the new god will be born in Bethlehem, which Christianity associates with passive infancy and the tenderness of maternal love, makes it brutishness particularly frightful” .