By W. B. Yeats
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?
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Summary · Analysis and Themes · Form and Structure · Historical Context
Glossary · In Popular Culture · Related Poems
Summary
The poem opens on an image of collapse. A falcon spirals outward in a widening circle, flying so far that it can no longer hear the falconer who controls it — a picture of a civilization spinning loose from its center. Order disintegrates: things fall apart, anarchy floods the world, and a tide of violence drowns all innocence. In the most quoted lines, the speaker observes that the best people have lost all conviction while the worst are charged with fanatical energy.
Convinced that some great revelation must be near, the speaker invokes the Second Coming — and is immediately seized by a nightmarish vision rising from the collective imagination of humankind. In the desert a monstrous sphinx-like shape, with a lion’s body and a man’s head, stirs to life under a blank and pitiless gaze. The vision fades, but the speaker now understands that the calm Christian era of the past two thousand years has been a sleep about to be shattered. The poem ends on an unanswered question: what terrible new force, its time finally arrived, is now crawling toward Bethlehem to be born?
Analysis and Themes
Few short poems carry as much weight as this one, and its power comes from the way Yeats fuses a private mystical philosophy with a vision of history that has felt newly urgent to every generation since.
History as a Turning Gyre
The poem rests on Yeats’s belief that history moves not forward but in vast spiraling cycles, each lasting roughly two thousand years. The “widening gyre” of the opening line is this cycle reaching its outermost limit, the point at which one age unravels and its opposite is born. The Christian era, begun at Bethlehem, has spun itself out; what comes next will be its violent inverse. The poem is less a prophecy of a specific event than a model of how civilizations exhaust themselves and give way to something utterly unlike them.
The Center That Cannot Hold
The first stanza is a catalogue of disintegration, and its genius is its refusal to name a single cause. The falcon and falconer, the loosed tide of blood, the drowned ceremony of innocence — these are images of any social order losing its binding force. The closing diagnosis of the stanza, that conviction has drained from the good while fanaticism fills the worst, has become one of the most-cited descriptions of political crisis in the language precisely because it fits so many of them. Yeats describes the structure of collapse, not one collapse, which is why the lines keep being reborn in new emergencies.
The Rough Beast and the Subverted Nativity
The poem’s most disturbing move is to take the Christian promise of a Second Coming and twist it. The figure that arrives is not Christ returned but a monstrous sphinx, blank-eyed and merciless, slouching toward the birthplace of Jesus. By sending this “rough beast” to Bethlehem, Yeats turns the imagery of salvation inside out: the new age will be born in the cradle of the old, but it will be its dark opposite. The final question mark is essential — the beast is never identified, and the poem leaves the reader suspended in dread rather than offering the consolation of an answer.
Form and Structure
The poem is twenty-two lines of blank verse — unrhymed iambic pentameter — divided into two unequal stanzas. Yeats uses no regular rhyme scheme, which lets the lines move with the loose, urgent rhythm of a vision being reported as it happens.
The two-part structure enacts the poem’s argument. The short opening stanza of eight lines diagnoses the present crisis in clipped, declarative statements; the longer second stanza of fourteen lines moves from diagnosis into apocalyptic vision, its sentences lengthening and uncoiling as the desert image takes shape. Yeats drives the whole poem with repetition — “Turning and turning,” the doubled “Surely,” the echoed “Second Coming” — which builds the incantatory momentum of prophecy. Enjambment carries the second stanza forward almost without pause, so that the reader, like the speaker, is pulled helplessly toward the final, unresolved question.
Historical Context
Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in January 1919, and the poem is saturated with the catastrophes of its moment. The First World War had just ended, having killed millions; the Russian Revolution of 1917 had overturned an ancient order; the Irish War of Independence was beginning in Yeats’s own country; and the global influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 was sweeping the world. Yeats’s pregnant wife, Georgie, had caught the virus and nearly died as he was composing the poem. The sense of a world coming apart was not abstract to him.
The poem also draws on the private mystical system Yeats was developing in these years, later set out in his prose work A Vision, which mapped history as a sequence of two-thousand-year cycles represented by interlocking cones, or gyres. “The Second Coming” was first printed in the American magazine The Dial in November 1920 and collected the following year in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), where Yeats appended notes explaining the gyres to readers who could not have known the cosmology behind the imagery. Yeats, a central figure of the Irish Literary Revival and later a senator of the Irish Free State, would win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.
Glossary
- Gyre: A spiral or widening circular motion. In Yeats’s personal philosophy, history turns in interlocking cone-shaped gyres, each age spiraling outward until it collapses into its opposite.
- Falcon and falconer: A trained hawk and its handler; the bird circling beyond the falconer’s call is an image of humanity losing touch with the order that once governed it.
- The ceremony of innocence: The rituals and customs that protect and dignify the innocent; here, swept away by the rising tide of violence.
- Spiritus Mundi: Latin for “spirit of the world.” Yeats’s term for a universal collective memory or imagination, a shared storehouse of images from which the desert vision rises.
- The rough beast / Bethlehem: The monstrous sphinx-like figure of the new age, crawling toward the birthplace of Christ — a dark inversion of the Nativity and of the promised Second Coming.
In Popular Culture
Few poems have donated more phrases to the language. Chinua Achebe took the title of his landmark 1958 novel Things Fall Apart directly from the poem’s third line, using Yeats’s image of disintegration to frame the collapse of a traditional society under colonial pressure.
Joan Didion borrowed the poem’s closing image for the title of her 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, applying Yeats’s sense of a culture unraveling to 1960s America. Lines such as “the centre cannot hold,” “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” and “the best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” are among the most frequently quoted in modern journalism, invoked during nearly every political crisis of the past century.
Related Poems
- Sailing to Byzantium by W. B. Yeats: Yeats’s companion meditation on the turning of historical eras and the search for permanence beyond decay.
- Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley: A sonnet on the inevitable collapse of even the mightiest civilization, sharing this poem’s long view of history.
- Darkness by Lord Byron: An earlier apocalyptic vision of the world’s end, as bleak and unsparing as Yeats’s desert prophecy.
- Channel Firing by Thomas Hardy: A darkly prophetic poem of war and judgment, voicing the same dread of a violence about to be unleashed.