| The Second Coming | |
| Author: | W. B. Yeats |
| Written: | 1919 |
| First: | The Dial |
| Country: | Ireland |
| Language: | English |
| Form: | Lyric poetry |
| Publication Date: | 1920 |
| Media Type: | |
| Lines: | 22 |
| Wikisource: | The Second Coming (Yeats) |
"The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920 and included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to describe allegorically the atmosphere of post-war Europe.[1] It is considered a major work of modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.[2]
The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War[3] and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence in January 1919, which followed the Easter Rising in April 1916, and before the British government had decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland. Yeats used the phrase "the second birth" instead of "the Second Coming" in his first drafts.[4]
To understand Yeats′s cosmology it is essential to read his book A Vision, where he explained his views on history and how it informed his poetry. Yeats saw human history as a series of epochs, what he called "gyres." He saw the age of classical antiquity as beginning with the Trojan War and then that thousand year cycle was overtaken by the Christian era, which is coming to a close. And that is the basis of the final line of the poem: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic. In the weeks preceding Yeats′s writing of the poem, his pregnant wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, caught the virus and was very close to death, but she survived. The highest death rates of the pandemic were among pregnant women, who in some areas had a death rate of up to 70%. Yeats wrote the poem while his wife was convalescing.[5] [6]
In 2009, David A. Ross identified "The Second Coming" as "one of the most famous poems in the English language,"[7] echoing Harold Bloom who, in 1986, cited the piece as "one of the most universally admired poems of our century."[8]
Critics agree that the poetry of Percy Shelley had a strong influence on the drafting of "The Second Coming." The first stanza matches the tone, diction, and syntax of Prometheus Unbound.[9] [10] [11] Both Harold Bloom and Jon Stallworthy speculate that the poem's sphinx draws off the imagery of Shelley's Ozymandias.[8] [9]
Critics have also argued that "The Second Coming" describes what Yeats elsewhere called an "antithetical dispensation" to the age ushered in by the birth of Jesus Christ.[12] Richard Ellmann understood the "rough beast" of the final lines as a creature to be born itself in Bethlehem, marking the cyclical (and violent) overturning of an age.[13] Giorgio Melchiori identified this same idea in Yeats' other writings, noting that
"(1) by 1896 Yeats had already some inkling of the cyclical theory of history which he was later to develop and expound in A Vision; (2) The Trojan war, the birth of Christ, and an indefinite event due to happen in our century were already considered by him as three fundamental crises in world history, each of which reverse the established order and ushered in a new cycle of civilization . . ."[14]
Phrases in the poem have been adopted as the title in a variety of media. The words "things fall apart" in the third line are alluded to by Chinua Achebe in his novel Things Fall Apart (1958), The Roots in their album Things Fall Apart (1999),[15] and Jon Ronson in his podcast series Things Fell Apart (2021).[16]
Similarly, the words "the centre cannot hold" in the same line are used in the title of Jonathan Alter's political biographyThe Center Holds (2013),[17] Sleater-Kinney's album The Center Won't Hold (2019),[18] and Junkie XL's song "The Center Will Not Hold, Twenty Centuries Of Stony Sleep" in the film Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021).[19]
Additionally, the phrase "slouches towards Bethlehem" in the last line is referenced in the title of Joan Didion's collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Joni Mitchell's musical adaptation of the poem "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (1991),[20] Robert Bork's non-fiction work Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996), and Brad DeLong's economic history Slouching Towards Utopia (2022).[21]
Other works whose titles come from lines in the poem includes Walker Percy’s novel The Second Coming (1980), Robert B. Parker's novel The Widening Gyre (1983), and multiple songs in Moby's album Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt (2018).[22]
The poem is quoted extensively in a number of books, including Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s political manifesto The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949),[23] and Stephen King's novel The Stand (1978).
It is also quoted extensively in numerous films and TV shows, including the episode "Revelations" (1994) of Babylon 5,[24] the director's cut of Nixon (1995),[25] multiple episodes including "The Second Coming" (2007) of The Sopranos,[26] the last episode of Devs (2020),[27] and the episode "The Queen's Speech" (2021) of See.[28]