Analysis Of The Second Coming By Yeats

William Butler Yeats is one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. He was born in Ireland and oscillated between Dublin and London for his education and his early adult life. However, he remained true to his cultural roots and served as an Irish Senator for two terms and was a pillar in the foundation of the Abbey Theatre and the Irish Literary Revival. The works of Yeats can be divided into two distinct phases and hence he is categorized as both a Romantic poet as well as a Modernist. The former was a result of his works till the turn of the 20th century which were highly influenced by poets like PB Shelley.
The shift from slow paced lyrical verses to direct and colloquial verses took place as his involvement with the Abbey Theatre

It is speculated that it is his response to the First World War. The poem opens by describing a grim scenario where there is chaos in the world and all order has fallen apart. There is a haphazard brutality that is taking over the world that is resulting in the disintegration of structure. In the second stanza however, the narrator declares that the chaos and confusion is the telltale sign of a revelation or a “Second Coming”. He goes on to describe the image of a beast with the “head of a man” and the body of a lion that was crouching and moving towards Bethlehem. The image resembles the Sphinx, implying that the revelation has an intrinsic connection to the Egyptian and Greco-Roman civilizations of the past. This is in tune with Yeats’ structure of history which marks a change in ideology every two thousand years or so. The “Second Coming” is not the return of Christ but instead another symbol that heralds the new age or the second coming of an age of

She was a beautiful Irish revolutionary who rejected Yeats’ proposals of marriage three times. The poem describes her as a firebrand and compares her to the notoriously mischievous Helen of Troy. She partook in the Easter Rising of 1916 and was known to act as a catalyst to the “most violent ways” of the revolution that took place in Ireland at the time. She had the ability to stir the masses and taught them unbridled violence and hatred. Yeats, on the other hand, believed that Irishmen could be unified and emerge victorious through the understanding their self identity and courage rather than resort to