Turning and turning in a widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center 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 toward Bethlehem to be born?
--William Butler Yeats
Notes and Comments on "The Second Coming"
"The Second Coming":
- In Christian terms, a reference to the return to earth of
Jesus Christ, when the world will end, the dead will be raised,
and the final judgment will occur.
- For Yeats, this reference is to the end of one cycle of history
and the approach of another.
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gyre:
- Yeats called each cycle of history a "gyre"--literally
a circular or spiral turn. (He pronounced it with a hard "g.")
He had a complicated system detailed in his book A Vision
that proposed history as a series of 2,000 year eras, each of
which begins and ends with some apocalyptic event in which the
divine (in a Christian or some other form) inserts itself into
human history resulting in cataclysmic historical and mythological
consequences.
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Mere anarchy:
- Yeats may have intended this and the description in the lines
that follow as a reference to the Russian Revolution of 1917.
- Alternately, he may have been thinking of World War I.
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The ceremony of innocence:
- This phrase reflects Yeats' appreciation of ritual as the
basis of civilized living.
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Spiritus Mundi:
- The spirit or soul of the universe, according to Yeats, with
which all individual souls are connected through the "Great
Memory," which he held to be a universal subconscious in
which the human race preserves its past memories. It is thus a
source of symbolic images for the poet.
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twenty centuries:
- The 2,000 years of the Christian era, in Yeats' scheme.
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rocking cradle:
- The cradle of Jesus in Bethlehem.
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