1

Rood

Megan Rood

Lily Davenport

English 206-010

October 12, 2020

Spooky Season

William Butler Yeats has an unique writing style among both nineteenth- and

twentieth-century poets. Yeats poem describes a nightmarish scene. The two stanzas of the poem

allow the reader to grasp what is going on within Yeats’ mind. Yeats may not be the direct

speaker of this poem, but based off textual evidence within the poem we can conclude that the

speaker is someone who can see things that no one else can. Someone whom is observing the

world around them with horror. We can assume that the speaker is very pessimistic, and not

afraid to use religious imagery. In the first stanza, the speaker observes a world that is losing

touch with order. Violence is destroying innocence and people have become detached from their

leaders. However, the loudest speakers in this stanza are the villains and chaos-bringers. Yeats’

take on the Second Coming is a drastic spinoff from the original “coming” of Jesus Christ.

Yeats was born in Sandymount Ireland, but raised in London where he received his

education. He was fascinated with Irish Legends which kickstarted his interest in poetry.

However, unlike many of the researchers and writers that came before him, he took the stories of

Irish folklore with the utmost seriousness; holding many of their facets as absolute truth

(O’Mahony). For Yeats, the mystical otherworld was a real as the one he lived and breathed

himself. Yeats believed that art and politics were intrinsically linked and used his writing to

express his attitudes toward Irish politics, as well as to educate his readers about Irish cultural

history. From an early age, Yeats felt a deep connection to Ireland and his national identity, and
2
Rood

he thought that British rule negatively impacted Irish politics and social life. As Yeats became

more involved in Irish politics—through his relationships with the Irish National Theatre, the

Irish Literary Society, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and Maud Gonne—his poems

increasingly resembled political manifestos. Yeats wrote numerous poems about Ireland’s

involvement in World War I (“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” [1919], “A Meditation in

Time of War” [1921]), Irish nationalists and political activists (“On a Political Prisoner” [1921],

“In Memory of Eva Gore Booth and Con Markiewicz” [1933]), and the Easter Rebellion

(“Easter 1916” [1916]) (O’Mahony). Yeats believed that art could serve a political function:

poems could both critique and comment on political events, as well as educate and inform a

population.

The poems outline plays a very important role in how Yeats describes in great detail the

essence of the “Second Coming” and how it is going to occur. The poem begins with the phrase

“Turing and turning in the widening gyre,” which evokes a supernatural symbol of interlocked

circles. A gyre is a spiral (vortex) and Yeats believed that the universe was comprised of

interlocked circles. Essentially this first line indicates that there is something churning and

awakening something new into existence out of the current haze of life that we are living in,

expanding it and enlarging the scope of what life is and altering how the world works on a

fundamental level. Then the poem takes a major shift of what is occurring around the speaker.

Certainly, all of this chaos cannot be occurring on accident. Something very drastic is coming,

some distorted version on the Christian apocalypse is descending on the land.

The second stanza describes the speaker’s vision for what the Second Coming is. This

new world is redefined by all the violence and chaos that occurred in the past. He thinks about

the “Spiritus Mundi,” (line 12) which in Latin means “World Spirit,” and begins to visualize
3
Rood

images within this “Spiritus Mundi,” including desert sphinxes and shadowy birds. By the end of

the poem, the speaker is sure that something even worse is coming. Some nightmare “rough

beast” is rising and approaching the earth at a rapid pace. He does not know what this creature is,

but he can sense its approach and it is the ominous core of “The Second Coming,” that

mysterious tide of evil and mystery approaching the world in the form of a modernity full of

violence, war, and the loss of traditional meaning and values. Within both of the stanzas the

author is trying to persuade people that after all of the chaos, confusion, and pain in the world a

savior was coming to save them. Yeats uses an alternative Christian idea of the “Second

Coming.” He does this by using imagery in the second stanza, when the speaker is receiving a

vision of the future, but this vision replaces Jesus’s heroic return with what seem to be an arrival

of a grotesque beast; a “lion body and the head of a man” (line 14). Yeats is ultimately is trying

to persuade people of society’s collapse.

A major factor within all of Yeats work is his use of allusions. Within “The Second

Coming” there is a very unsettling take on Christian morality, suggesting that it is not the stable

and reliable force that people believe it to be. The poem clearly alludes to the biblical Book of

Revelation from when Jesus returns to Earth to save the worthy. According to the Bible, this

happened when humanity reaches the end. The poem suggest that the end times are already

happening, because humanity has lost all sense of morality, and perhaps that this morality was

only an allusion to begin with. This is seen within the first line of the second stanza when the

poem hints that a moment of divine intervention must be at hand (after the chaos of the first

stanza). Rather than returning the world to peace, this new revelation makes things worse; a new

grotesque beast heads toward Bethlehem (the birthplace of Jesus), to be brought into the world

(line 22). If Jesus was the figurehead of a moral movement, this new beastly leader is the
4
Rood

figurehead of a new world. This contributes to the passage because the poem portrays Christian

morality and prophecy as weak, or even proven false, in the face of the violence and destruction

that humans have created. Along with the use of allusions, Yeats provides a lot of metaphors

such as, “the Falcon” and “the falconer” (line 2). Both stand for the world and the controlling

force that directs humanity. Similarly, “the blood-dimmed tide” stands for waves of violence,

while “the rough beast” stands for “the Second Coming.” These contribute to the passage by

adding more of a fictional dictation. This allows Yeats to get his point across in more of an

understandable matter.

Yeats had very strong beliefs and portrayed them in his work. The lack of shame

shaped his writing career which ultimately leads him to receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in

1923. Yeats really pushes the thought his work that there is something churning and awakening

something new into existence out of the current haze of life that we are living in, expanding it

and enlarging the scope of what life is and altering how the world works on a fundamental level.

This “coming” is vastly different than the first. The “first coming” has a savior within Jesus,

whereas the second the “savior” is not a savior for the people but for the world. Yeats strongly

utilizes figure of speech by using metaphors and allusions. By using these Yeats provides a lot of

visual ques for the readers to acquire to help persuade his argument on how the world is going to

end.
 5
Rood

Reference:

O’Mahony, Olivia. “How W.B. Yeats Changed the Face of Irish Folklore.” Shamrock Craic, 6 June

2019, www.shamrockgift.com/blog/yeats-irish-folklore/.

Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, poets.org/poet/w-b-yeats.

“The Second Coming (Poem).” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 6 Oct. 2020,

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem).

Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry

Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming.

“The Second Coming”

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

6
Rood

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?