Written in 1919, a year after the end of the catastrophic First World War, 'The Second Coming' is W.B. Yeats' attempt to question the state of the world as he saw it. Amid the apocalyptic climate of post-war Europe, where, in the words of Larkin, there would be "never such innocence" ever again, Yeats could no longer find comfort in the idea of a good, healing 'second coming', but started to wonder, instead, if any such event might well be a far more sinister and violent affair: no heroic Christ, but a hellish monster instead...
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?
* Spiritus Mundi: The phrase "spiritus mundi" (literally "spirit of the world") is a reference to Yeats' belief that each human mind is linked to a single vast intelligence, and that this intelligence causes certain universal symbols to appear in individual minds.
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