William Butler Yeats’ Poem The Second Coming: A Striking Metaphor on Humanity’s Slide into Darkness

Over time, the poet William Butler Yeats has been a fascinating study for me. Yeats spent years crafting an elaborate, mystical theory of the universe he described in his book A Vision. This theory issued in part from Yeats’s lifelong fascination with the occult and the mystical, and in part from the sense of responsibility Yeats felt to order his experience within a structured belief system. The system is extremely complicated and not of any lasting importance, except perhaps for the effect that it had on his poetry, which itself is of extraordinary lasting importance. The theory of history Yeats articulated in A Vision centers on a diagram made of two conical spirals, one inside the other, so that the widest part of one of the spirals rings around the narrowest part of the other spiral, and vice versa. Yeats believed that this image (he called the spirals “gyres”) captured the contrary motions inherent within the historical process, and he divided each gyre into specific regions that represented particular kinds of historical periods (and could also represent the psychological phases of an individual’s development as well as society’s development).

In light of this, I ask that you consider his poem The Second Coming. The Second Coming was intended by Yeats to describe the current historical trend (starting in 1921) in terms of these gyres. Yeats believed that the world was sliding toward darkness and an eventual apocalyptic ending of sorts, as history reached the end of the outer gyre (to speak roughly) and began moving along the inner gyre. He does not literally mean a religious or Christian apocalypse, but he uses the religious references and his own metaphysical descriptions as a sort of metaphor to illustrate humanity’s ongoing slide into darkness. In his definitive edition of Yeats’s poems, Richard J. Finneran quotes Yeats’s own notes:

“The end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to its place of greatest contraction… The revelation [that] approaches will… take its character from the contrary movement of the interior gyre…”

In other words, the world’s trajectory along the gyre of science, democracy, and heterogeneity is coming apart, like the frantically widening flight-path of the falcon that has lost contact with the falconer; the next age will take its character not from the gyre of science, democracy, and speed, but from the contrary inner gyre—which opposes rationality, reasonability, morality, enlightened liberality, and slowness to the science and democracy of the outer gyre. The “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem is the symbol of this new coming dark age; the speaker’s vision of the rising sphinx is his vision of the character of the new world.

As poetry, and understood more correctly and broadly than as a simple reiteration of the mystic or religious reference to A Vision, The Second Coming is a magnificent statement about the contrary forces at work in history, and about the conflict between the light and the darkness (i.e. reasonableness vs. irrationality). The aesthetic experience of the poem’s passionate language and message is powerful enough to ensure its value and its importance in Yeats’s work as a whole.

So, where am I going with this in such a long-winded fashion? First, read The Second Coming in its entirety. Then, read the partial quotes below and see if they do not perfectly reflect the degree of humanity’s slide into darkness you have witnessed over the course of your own life.

 

“…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.”

 

“…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?”