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The Second Coming

FORM AND
STRUCTURE

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‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;’ the caesura reflects meaning, idea of
things fragmenting and splitting
Demarcation between ideas in first and second stanza
Loose meter of poem, very close to free verse, written in iambic pentameter

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CONTEXT

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THEMES

QUOTES
AND
ANALYSIS

Written 1919
Title is from the book of revelation, prophecy: at end of world terrible
things will happen and Jesus will come
Yeats married wife who believed she was a spiritual medium, used to
write down what spirits would tell her, they would discuss these
prophetic ideas that came to her in her trance like states
Poem relies on vagueness of Christian memory, you can interpret
through a biblical or Christian approach
1930s people saw it as a prophecy about fascism + Hitler was the ‘rough
beast’ + out of this would come a new episode of history (WW2 started
around 1939)

Religion

‘Turning and turning in the widening
gyre The falcon cannot hear the
falconer;
Turning = use of verbs
meaning/representing
circularity, uses present
participle
- History is circling around birth
of Christ, getting further away
from Christ so Christianity gets
fragmented
- Jesus is falconer, people can no
longer see Jesus
- Idea of pessimism in the poem
- Bird symbolises freedom,
moving away from fixed set of
beliefs/controller
‘Surely the Second Coming is at hand

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