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
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?


BRIEF ANALYSIS 

"The Second Coming" is one the popular poems of William Butler Yeats ,because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language. The first stanza describes the conditions present in the World i.e. Things Falling Apart , Anarchy is loosed etc. While the second stanza surmises from those conditions that a monstrous 'Second Coming ' is about to take place , not of the Jesus we first knew ,but of a 'New Messiah' a "Rough Beast" the slouching sphinx rousing itself in the desert and lumbering towards Bethlehem. 

The poem appeared in the year 1921 ,just after the First World War or The Great War and the poem describes the current historical movement in terms of these gyres. He believed that the world has on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation,as history reached the end of extremely outer gyre and began moving along the inner gyre.

The poem tragically describe the hallucinations and illusions of human being towards the scientific World and machineries. Democracy and Heterogeneity is now coming apart.The thought of morality and religious had fade out and people ruined each others for the sake of power and faded dominance.