Yeats wrote The Second Coming while his wife recovered from pandemic flu
In 1919, with Europe exhausted by war, Ireland entering its War of Independence and his pregnant wife Georgie barely surviving influenza, W. B. Yeats wrote a short poem about civilisation spinning apart. The Second Coming has become one of the most quoted poems in English, and it grew from his strange theory of history as whirling cones.
The poem first appeared in The Dial in November 1920 and then in the 1921 collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Its moment was grim. The First World War had just ended, the Irish War of Independence began in January 1919, and the flu pandemic was killing pregnant women at terrible rates, in some places up to 70 percent. Georgie Yeats caught it weeks before he wrote the poem and was convalescing as he worked.
Behind it lies the private system Yeats set out in his book A Vision. He pictured history as gyres, cone shapes that combine a line standing for time and feeling with a plane standing for space and intellect. Paired cones widen and narrow against each other, and roughly every two thousand years one reaches crisis and a new civilisation is born. Greco-Roman values, in his scheme, had given way to Christianity, and the twentieth century would bring another reversal. Early drafts spoke of a second birth rather than a second coming.
The two stanzas follow that pattern. The first shows the widening gyre: a falcon that can no longer hear the falconer, anarchy loosed, innocence drowned, and good people paralysed while the worst burn with conviction. The second becomes a single prophecy. From the Spiritus Mundi, a world soul, rises the vision of a sphinx-like creature in the desert with a blank, merciless gaze, circled by angry birds that echo the lost falcon. The ending imagines a rough beast heading toward Bethlehem to be born, overturning the age that began there.
Critics hear Shelley throughout: the first stanza's tone recalls Prometheus Unbound, and Harold Bloom and Jon Stallworthy link the sphinx to Ozymandias. Many read it as a picture of collapsing political legitimacy, and Richard Ellmann saw the beast as the violent god of a new cycle. Bloom in 1986 called it among the most admired poems of the century, and it sits in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry as a modernist classic.
Source: The Second Coming (poem)
