The Second Coming (poem)

"The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920 and included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer.<ref name="grdn"/> The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to describe allegorically the atmosphere of post-war Europe.<ref>Template:Citation.</ref> It is considered a canonical work of modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Historical context

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence in January 1919, which followed the Easter Rising in April 1916, and before the British government had decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland. Yeats used the phrase "the second birth" instead of "the Second Coming" in his first drafts.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Yeats's cosmology is laid out in his book A Vision, where he explained his views on history and how it informed his poetry. Yeats saw human history as a series of epochs, what he called "gyres". He saw the age of classical antiquity as beginning with the Trojan War and then that thousand year cycle was overtaken by the Christian era, which is coming to a close. And that is the basis of the final line of the poem: "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic. In the weeks preceding Yeats′s writing of the poem, his pregnant wife, Georgie, caught the virus and was very close to death, but she survived. The highest death rates of the pandemic were among pregnant women, who in some areas had a death rate of up to 70%. Yeats wrote the poem while his wife was convalescing.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="grdn">Template:Cite news</ref>

Critical engagement

In 2009, David A. Ross identified "The Second Coming" as "one of the most famous poems in the English language",<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> echoing Harold Bloom who, in 1986, cited the piece as "one of the most universally admired poems of our century".<ref name="Bloom">Template:Cite book</ref>

Critics agree that the poetry of Percy Shelley had a strong influence on the drafting of "The Second Coming". The first stanza matches the tone, diction, and syntax of Prometheus Unbound.<ref name="Stall">Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Both Harold Bloom and Jon Stallworthy speculate that the poem's sphinx draws on the imagery of Shelley's "Ozymandias".<ref name="Bloom"/><ref name="Stall"/>

Critics have also argued that "The Second Coming" describes what Yeats elsewhere called an "antithetical dispensation" to the age ushered in by the birth of Jesus Christ.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Richard Ellmann understood the "rough beast" of the final lines as a creature to be born itself in Bethlehem, marking the cyclical (and violent) overturning of an age.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Giorgio Melchiori identified this same idea in Yeats' other writings, noting that

Cultural influences

Titles

Phrases in the poem have been adopted as the title in a variety of media. The words "things fall apart" in the third line are alluded to by Chinua Achebe in his novel Things Fall Apart (1958),<ref name="grdn" /> The Roots in their album Things Fall Apart (1999),<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and Jon Ronson in his podcast series Things Fell Apart (2021).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Similarly, the words "the centre cannot hold" in the same line are used in the title of Elyn Saks' book about her experience with schizophrenia while obtaining her PhD at Oxford, and later her JD at Yale, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (2008),<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Jonathan Alter's book on U.S. President Barack Obama's first term, The Center Holds (2013),<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> the Netflix biographical documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017), Sleater-Kinney's album The Center Won't Hold (2019),<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> and Junkie XL's song "The Center Will Not Hold, Twenty Centuries Of Stony Sleep" in the film Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021).<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

Additionally, the phrase "slouches towards Bethlehem" in the last line is referenced in the title of Joan Didion's collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968),<ref name="grdn" /> Joni Mitchell's musical adaptation of the poem "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (1991),<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Robert Bork's non-fiction work Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996), Daniel Ravipinto and Star Foster’s interactive fiction game Slouching Towards Bedlam (2003),<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> and Brad DeLong's economic history Slouching Towards Utopia (2022).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Other works whose titles come from lines in the poem includes Walker Percy’s novel The Second Coming (1980),<ref name="grdn" /> Robert B. Parker's novel The Widening Gyre (1983), Amos Elon's essay collection A Blood-Dimmed Tide (1997), and multiple songs in Moby's album Everything Was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt (2018).<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

Quotes

The poem is quoted extensively in a number of books, including Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s political manifesto The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949),<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and Stephen King's novel The Stand (1978).<ref name="grdn" />

It is also quoted extensively in numerous films and TV shows, including the episode "Revelations" (1994) of Babylon 5,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> the director's cut of Nixon (1995),<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> multiple episodes including "The Second Coming" (2007) of The Sopranos,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> the last episode of Devs (2020),<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> the episode "The Queen's Speech" (2021) of See,<ref name="sees02e07">Template:Cite web</ref> and by Kenneth Clark in the final episode of his 1969 documentary series Civilisation.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

The reference to the beast "[slouching] towards Bethlehem" in the poem's final line is quoted in the first verse of Irish singer-songwriter Andrew John Hozier-Byrne's track NFWMB.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

External links

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• Text (as originally published)