William Butler Yeats The Second Coming

“He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.” For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence. He will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness is a shield and buckler. You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday. -Psalm 91: 1-6 ” (Jesus) The Second Coming, written by William Butler Yeats, addresses the concept of the gyre and portrays an approach to a new world order. Yeats expresses his belief of the soon coming end of the

“The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…” (Lines: 2-4) This powerful description of the coming apocalypse and stark imagery of a falcon leaves an early impression of a near future of chaos. The words mere anarchy and a blood dimmed tide recall the bloody seas of the Revelation of Saint John, the flood from the mouth of the serpent and vials of wrath. (Vision) “And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood … And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood. -Revelations 8:8, 12:15” (Jesus) The phrase “The ceremony of innocence is drowned” (Line 6) is linked to a poem publicized in the later months of 1919, A Prayer for my Daughter, where the poet asks “How but in custom and ceremony Are innocence and beauty born?” here the phrase suggests a vague image of whatever the reader’s imagination summons, what is this “ceremony of innocence” that Yeats is constantly mentioning? The ceremony of innocence is an uncommon belief that when things are falling apart, humanity must express their faith that death and destruction will not have the final word. (Ceremony) The following lines, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of

The repetitions and echoes of the first stanza, “turning and turning, loosed … loosed, falcon … falconer,” (Yeats) are emphasized at the beginning of the second stanza, “Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming!” (Lines 9-11) The phrase used in the original draft was ‘the second birth’, but in the final version the philosophical idea is linked far more clearly to the Second Coming of Christ, and is then reinforced by the mention of Bethlehem in the last line. Yet if this is a second coming, it is not the second coming of Christ evangelized in the Book of Revelation or the Gospels. (Vision) The underlying metric pattern of “The Second Coming” is iambic pentameter in which each line is made up of five iambic feet. However, this fundamental meter is not immediately evident in Yeats’ poem, because the first line of each stanza begins with an emphatic trochee and then moves into a very irregular, but nonetheless incantatory rhythm of mostly iambs. The poem is sprinkled with variant feet which enhance and emphasize the stresses that follow them and the last line repeats the strange pattern of the first lines of the section, beginning with a bang, the trochee, followed by the tripping of unstressed syllables as the second foot is turned around into an iamb. (Study) This lack of structure within the poem helps the reader