The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats
Quick answer: The Second Coming by W. B. Yeats analysed: the widening gyre, the rough beast, the poem's two-part structure, and why its prophecy keeps returning.
Whenever history lurches, editors reach for this poem. Written in 1919 and published in 1920, The Second Coming has supplied titles, headlines and epigraphs for a century, things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, and its closing question about a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem may be the most quoted prophecy in modern literature. Yeats wrote it with the First World War just ended, revolution in Russia, war gathering in Ireland, and the influenza pandemic in his own house: his pregnant wife nearly died of it.
The poem's power is often mistaken for vagueness, as if it were a mood with quotable parts. It is in fact a precise two-stage machine: first a diagnosis delivered in images, then a vision that arrives, interrupts, and fails to console. Reading it slowly reveals a poet in complete control of an apparently apocalyptic voice.
The poem
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,
W. B. Yeats, 'The Second Coming' (1920)
What the poem says
The first stanza is diagnosis. A falcon spirals outward in a widening gyre until it can no longer hear the falconer: the image of a world losing contact with whatever once commanded it. Then the sentences shorten into verdicts. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, a blood-dimmed tide drowning the ceremony of innocence. The stanza ends with its most repeated observation: the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. No names, no nations, and so every era since has recognised itself.
The second stanza turns from diagnosis to vision. Surely, the speaker says twice, some revelation is at hand, surely the Second Coming. But the phrase summons the wrong image. Out of Spiritus Mundi, the world's storehouse of images, comes not Christ but a shape with a lion's body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, moving its slow thighs across desert sands while shadows of indignant birds reel above. Darkness drops again, but now the speaker knows one thing: twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle. The poem ends on its question, what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
How it works
The verse is blank in the main, rough iambic pentameter without rhyme, and Yeats loosens the metre exactly where the sense loosens: the falcon lines turn and widen, the verdict lines snap shut. The poem's famous quotability comes from that second mode, short declarative sentences placed like slabs, each one grammatically complete and portable. A poet who wants to be quoted should study how few words those sentences risk.
The central craft decision is the failed allusion. By invoking the Second Coming, Yeats loads the reader with an expectation of redemption, then delivers a sphinx. The gap between the phrase and the vision is the poem's meaning: revelation arrives, but not the one civilisation ordered. Behind this sits Yeats's private system of gyres, interpenetrating spirals of history in which each two-thousand-year era is undone by its opposite, but the poem never requires the system. The images carry it, which is why readers who have never heard of his book A Vision quote it correctly anyway. And the ending on a question, rather than a prophecy fulfilled, keeps the poem permanently loaded.
Why it lasts
The Second Coming lasts because it describes structure, not events. Any era's collapse involves centres failing to hold, moderate people hesitating and fanatics accelerating, so the first stanza rediscovers its relevance every generation, in 1939, in 1968, in every anxious election year since. Its phrases have named novels, from Achebe's Things Fall Apart onward, films, albums and countless essays; few poems have colonised the language so thoroughly.
It also lasts because it refuses comfort without collapsing into despair. The rough beast is coming, its hour come round at last, but the poem ends before it arrives, in the interrogative. That question mark is the honest posture before an unreadable future, and honesty wears better than either hope or doom.
What today's poet can steal
Steal the two-stanza engine: diagnosis then vision, images then apparition, with the second stanza summoned by a word the first has earned. Steal the slab sentence as well. When your poem reaches its verdict, contract to short, complete, unqualified statements; the surrounding looseness makes them ring.
Most transferable of all is the failed allusion. Invoke a story your reader trusts, a homecoming, a wedding, a resurrection, then deliver its estranged double, and let the gap speak. Political poems date when they name the news; Yeats shows how to write the weather of a crisis instead of its headlines, which is why his 1919 is always this year.
What poets can take from this
- Structure a crisis poem as diagnosis then vision, and let one word summon the turn.
- Contract to short slab sentences at the moment of verdict; looseness elsewhere makes them ring.
- Invoke a familiar redemption story and deliver its estranged double.
- Describe the structure of a crisis, not its headlines, so the poem outlives the news.
- End prophecy on a question; the unanswered is what keeps readers returning.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in two stanzas: the first diagnosing what is loose in your own time using one animal image and three short verdict sentences, the second describing the arrival that your era's favourite hopeful word actually summons.
Questions
What is The Second Coming by Yeats about?
Written after the First World War, the poem diagnoses a civilisation spinning out of control, the falcon deaf to the falconer, the centre failing, and then envisions the revelation this collapse summons: not Christ returning but a pitiless sphinx-like beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
What does the widening gyre mean?
The gyre is Yeats's image of a spiral widening as it turns. The falcon circling beyond the falconer's voice pictures a world losing contact with its guiding centre. In Yeats's larger system, gyres are the spirals of history, each era unravelling into its opposite.
What is the rough beast in The Second Coming?
The rough beast is the shape the speaker sees rising from Spiritus Mundi: a lion-bodied, man-headed form with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun. It embodies the violent new era replacing the Christian one, announced by the poem's final unanswered question.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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