The Second Coming Yeats, William Butler - Nathan Cervo (essay date 1995)
Nathan Cervo (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: "Yeats's 'The Second Coming'," in The Explicator, Vol. 53, No. 3, Spring, 1995, pp. 161-3.
[In the following essay, Cervo explores the prophetic implications of "The Second Coming" with regard to Christian millennarianism.]
Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" was published in Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), a few years after Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West, which appeared just after the close of World War I and the Balfour Declaration (1917). In a long note on the widening "gyre" (line 1) mentioned in the poem, Yeats observed: "All our scientific, democratic, fact-accumulating, heterogeneous civilization belongs to the outward gyre and prepares not for the continuation of itself but the revelation as in a lightening flash .. . of the civilization that must slowly take its place."1 The outward gyre, Yeats tells us, is unlike the gyre before the time of Christ,...
[The entire page is 1127 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
Related Topics
