William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming

"The Second Coming"
-William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center 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?

This is the poem that contributed to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Chinua Achebe also got the name of his book from the poem. Specifically the excerpt of the poem was in the beginning of Things Fall Apart.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;,
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

I feel that this poem is very deep and thoughtful. The things that this poem consists of are not simple words on paper. It goes in depth of describing the darkness of the word using symbols, imagery, and personification. This poem expresses its ideas with the actions of symbolic things, for example “reel shadows of the indignant desert birds”. The readers are put to the spot of trying to picture everything the poem says and understanding the meaning behind every item. There is no one meaning behind the verses of the poem. It may be interpreted in many ways, but I think that’s what the author wanted his readers to do, to analyze the poem and figure out the meaning behind each symbol that he laid out. In the end, his poem is multi- dimension with many hidden meanings encrypted within it.