[In the following essay, Bloom analyzes "The Second Coming" in light of Yeats's philosophical writings, calling the poem "a masterpiece of complexity. "]

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
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?¹

It is truistic that all of the best poets use symbols of one kind or another to represent attitudes or emotions or situations. Now the reading of poetry is a matter of skill as well as of taste. Most poets presuppose a certain amount of skill in reading and even knowledge of some allusions, be they topical, mythical, or religious. Enjoyment comes, in Wordsworth's phrase, from "the sense of difficulty overcome." There is pleasure in recognizing a challenge and then satisfactorily answering it. Some poets, like Blake, or Yeats, or Eliot, find artistic advantage in the use of symbols frequently designated as "private." The word "private," however, is inaccurate when, with the passage of time and through critical clarification, the symbols become clear enough to discriminating readers. Private symbolism becomes even less of a charge when a poet like Yeats creates works that have a satisfying meaning regardless of the reader's knowledge of his philosophical, introspective processes. To understand these processes, of course, is to enlarge the connotative value of what he has said. But even with knowledge derived only from a close reading of the individual works, we may still derive enjoyment from his poetry.

Assuming that we have never read Yeats' philosophical system, "The Second Coming" will lend itself to interpretation for the average trained reader who desires to understand. First let us see what paraphrase reveals. The poem opens with concrete statement: The falcon, a savage hawk trained to aid in hunting, flies in increasing circles or spirals (gyres). A difficult bird to keep in captivity, the falcon responds to a primitive urge to return to its savage state. Despising civilized restraint, it kills for the joy of killing. In the second stanza Yeats makes a prophecy couched in the more abstract language that marks the concluding lines of the preceding stanza. He prophesies that the falcon is a harbinger of a revelation, of a Second Coming. Now the Second Coming, we know, is an orthodox concept of the reincarnation of Christ. But the specific details which conclude the stanza and the poem anticipate not the coming of Christ, even as avenger, but of a monster which, like the falcon, suggests destruction; at the same time it suggests something mysterious or unknown. This knowledge comes to the poet in a vision as an omen—in which the Egyptian Sphinx rises to life and Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.

The image evokes terror: If the falcon returns to a state of wild nature we can understand that it is responding to certain instincts, subhuman though they be. But the Sphinx, a thing of sand and stone, having had no existence—at least as we would understand existence during the recorded history of mankind—is now incarnated. The vision is all the more terrifying because the Sphinx has come to life for some grotesque, unknown purpose, and because, unlike the falcon, it is of such monstrosity that we feel it can never be held in check by any human agency. Upon the evidence of the poem itself, we might be inclined to interpret Yeats as saying that Christianity has failed to sustain mankind and that an ominous, larger principle is about to replace it. Barbaric paganism of which the Sphinx is mutely symbolic (it might be construed from the details immediately available to us) was restrained by the birth of Christ. Paganism, however, never really died; it was merely kept in check by an abiding principle which, temporarily, was stronger than it, and under which it chafed, awaiting an opportunity to rebel. Continuing from the surface evidence of the poem, we might interpret Yeats as arguing that the Christian principle has meaning only while its tenets are in operation. But as soon as Christianity breaks down, permitting mere anarchy to be loosed upon the world, there can be no restraining of this monstrous symbol of seeming evil, since evil can be subjugated only by good. Later in this analysis, however, we shall introduce additional testimony by Yeats that must cause some qualification of these statements.

The word gyre is an uncommon one and consequently captures the attention at the very beginning of the poem. Not only does it fit the metrical objective more easily than, say, circle or spiral, but it also lends at least a subconscious preparation for some unusual occurrence or thought to follow. In the same line, also, we find three polysyllabic words, turning - turning - widening, whose denotations of slow movement and gradually increasing distance are enhanced by vocalic repetition and by the identical -ing suffixes. There is further significance in the i- assonance, which closely reinforces the linkage between widening and gyre, and in the consonantal association between turning and gyre; the metrical relations are essential to the full meaning of the line. The thought runs on to the second line, where the effect is enlarged by the completed clause. Here the slow-motion pattern is maintained by the repetition of falcon and falconer, with the addition of cannot, whose vowels are in assonance with the vowels of the two nouns. (This relationship, however, is essentially visual rather than auditory, because falcon is generally pronounced faulkon or faukon.) Up to this point we are thoroughly clear about the nature of the image, which is self-sufficient: the bird is escaping its captor. Yeats demands no further knowledge of his readers. The image, nevertheless, takes on an even more intensive connotation if we have read other works by Yeats and have some understanding of his attitudes.

This is not the place for an intensive examination of Yeats' philosophic system, but an outline of the major features will provide the key to his intention. In a work called A Vision Yeats recorded two pertinent ideas. One is that the human life goes through phases of subjectivity and objectivity, at one time or another the two qualities merging, and then the one or the other becoming predominant. The second is that history, comparably, goes through phases or cycles—each of 2,000 years duration—in a regular, deterministic manner. Both human life and history are represented by double cones or gyres operating in contrary directions. The narrow end of each cone illustrates the subjective and the wide end the objective phases of life and history. Yeats demonstrated this notion—not original with him—in unpublished notes to "The Second Coming."² "The mind whether expressed in history or in the individual life has a precise movement which can be quickened or slackened but cannot be otherwise altered, and this movement can be expressed by a mathematical form," the double cone. The discovery of "a fundamental mathematical movement" which marks each mind leads to an ability (by those properly qualified, of course) to prophesy "the entire future of that mind." Yeats explains the mathematical figures thus:

.. . the human soul is always moving outward into the objective, or inward into itself and this movement is double because the human soul has consciousness only because it is suspended between contraries, the greater the contrast the more intense the consciousness. The man in whom movement inward is stronger than the movement outward, the man who sees all life reflected within himself, the subjective man reaches the narrow end of a gyre at death which is always . . . preceded by an intensification of the subjective life. . . . The objective man on the other hand, whose gyre moves outward receives at this moment [of death] the revelation not of himself seen from within .. . but of himself as if he were somebody else.

The same is true of history. When one age is coming to an end "the revelation of the character of the next age is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion and of the other to that of its greatest contraction." Yeats uses the gyre in other poems, such as "Demon and Beast," which appeared in the same volume as "The Second Coming" (Michael Robartes and the Dancer, 1921), "Sailing to Byzantium" (in The Tower, 1928) and "The Gyres" (in Last Poems and Plays, 1940). Its specialized consistency and its explication by Yeats himself preclude suspicions of accident or eccentricity and, hence, merits such application as we may later be able to include in the meaning.

Following the almost languorous introduction, Yeats provides a sharp, shocking contrast in the third line by use of two abrupt clauses. This is the culmination of the physical action. The statement is now more general, even abstract, so that we know the falcon image is only a symbol for a larger philosophic idea. It is the bursting of the floodgates which leads to submergence of identity and to absolute objectivity. In this confusion we have the highly impersonal, objective, even ineffable Things. While he was restrained by man, the falcon flew in a regularly described circle or spiral, his widening gyre still limited by an invisible axis or center. But with the inevitable bursting of bondage the arbitrary limitation becomes impossible, since the act is deterministically inevitable. In other words a phase has ended and man once more has succumbed to savagery and mere anarchy. Each cycle of civilization must come to a disastrous close. As Yeats writes in A Vision:

Each age unwinds the threads another age has wound, and it amuses me to remember that before Phidias and his westward moving art, Persia fell, and that when full moon came round again, amid eastward moving thought, and brought Byzantine glory, Rome fell; and that at the outset of our westward moving Renaissance Byzantium fell; all things dying each other's life, living each other's death.

The implication, of course, is that each new cycle—if the pattern is repetitive—opens barbarically and without order. Mere, on the surface, is an ambiguous reference. Its connotation is slighting or trivial, as though Yeats were saying ironically, anarchy doesn't amount to much. But mere also has an obsolete denotation, which is more clearly the one intended by Yeats; that is, absolute, sheer, and unqualified anarchy.

To impress his point Yeats lengthens and emphasizes line 5, resorting to both consonance and assonance, which are paralleled (at least the assonance is) in line 4, where the new action has begun. Notice, also, the return to concrete statement, the poet wishing to dramatize the issue which now clearly relates to mankind: anarchy, after all, is human not animal violation of order at the end of one cycle and the beginning of a new one. The situation, then, obviously warlike, provokes an attack upon established morals and, more exactly, upon established order. Yeats, in delicate syntactical counterpoint, returns to expository and then abstract statement. Throughout the poem he has used Christian symbols because he considers himself a specific part of the present Christian cycle—now coming to a close.

Christianity, however, is only typical of all the other historical cycles. Thus, the ceremony of innocence has an immediate Christian reference that is paradoxical: an orthodox purifying symbol is the sacramental rite of baptism, but the purification is washed away by the blood of war. In another sense, however, the ceremony of innocence may be said to apply to similar rites in non-Christian cycles when sacrificial blood was let for religious purposes and when, again, wars negated the meanings of those rites. There is also in this phrase an implicit irony. If the above interpretation of the ceremony of innocence is acceptable, then Yeats seems to say that as man grows more mature and civilized, he grows more beastly. The ceremony of innocence should suggest purity and beginning, but the purity and beginning are negated by a collapsing civilization.

The passionate intensity of the first stanza appears at first to signify both exposition and physical action which bring the poet to his prophetic thematic conclusions in the second stanza. Such collapse of moral order, the poet intimates, must have far-reaching spiritual consequences. Ever since Christ, in the present cycle, there has been a theological premise that at some future time man will be called upon to account for his sins. But this assumption has had something of optimism in it for the virtuous, the belief being that judgment will be rendered by a God of justice and mercy. Now, however, we are prepared to look for a more esoteric meaning in this phrase. Christianity, as Yeats sees it, is simply one historical phase, and when he says

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity . . .

he may be speaking in general terms of the overt attitudes which precipitate the collapse of a civilization. This, of course, is also an ironic reversal of values as well as a realistic attitude. In his notes, however, Yeats says that it is a supreme act of faith to fix the attention upon the gyre (apparently to determine the degree of subjectivity or objectivity)

until the whole past and future of humanity or of an individual man shall be present to the intellect as if it were accomplished in a single movement. The intensity of the Beatific Vision when it comes depends upon the intensity of this realization.

It is a temptation to ignore this statement, a seeming contradiction of the idea as stated in the poem. If we relate passionate intensity to Yeats' philosophy, however, it seems to celebrate his notion of the reconciliation of opposites. While "the worst" are fanatically bent on pressing the destruction of civilization, the visionary philosopher is endowed with an insight denied to ordinary people. The widening gyre is the state of objectivity just prior to the completion of the cycle. The passionate intensity is the human action that accelerates the completion of the wheel, but it may also be interpreted as the Beatific Vision of the subjective philosopher who has reached his most subjective, introspective state, when he is most profoundly capable of prophesying the impending catastrophe. We can argue, of course, that the catastrophe, according to Yeats' philosophy, is inevitable. But Yeats impresses upon us in the first stanza that man has also had an active hand in the collapse. Any justification for this notion is provided by Yeats himself, since the last two lines of the first stanza become a transition to the second prophetic stanza, which states the vision and the resolution.

With the flagrant rejection of humanitarian conduct, Surely some revelation is at hand:/Surely the Second Coming is at hand. Repetition of Surely and the virtual identity of the two lines establishes an urgent, inescapable mood and a warning tone. So imperative is the poet's feeling that he repeats The Second Coming! sharply, and then pauses for the most emphatic caesura in the entire poem in order to enforce consideration of this crucial idea. In familiar orthodoxy the Second Coming would be the reincarnation of Christ for the purpose of rendering judgment on man. Yeats' philosophy, however, complicates this interpretation. Now he seems to say that a Second Coming takes place at the conclusion of every cycle. It is easy to over-emphasize the Christian elements of the poem, but the Christian symbolism—even if only representative—is too consistent to be dismissed. It is perhaps no distortion of Yeats' thinking to infer his condemnation of those who precipitate a collapse, inevitable though that collapse may be. The thought seems to come to Yeats that chaos which is urged out of a former moral state can hardly be rewarded by the mercy of a Christ. Thus he envisions a monstrous substitute for Christ, one that has some divine (Spiritus mundi) but foreboding source, and that has been sent to render harsh judgment on man.

The Sphinx is the symbol for a transformation from known to frightening and unknown values. Supposedly inanimate, this shape with lion body and the head of a man has merely lain dormant since a previous cycle, nursing its latent capacity for evil destruction and biding its time. The horror is enforced by its objectivity and merciless singleness of vengeful purpose. Yeats creates a terrifying and hypnotic image through the use of understatement as he envisions the awakening of the beast-god. The desert birds are indignant rather than terrified because they have no rational understanding of what is happening. Lacking insight, they associate only a temporal consequence with this action and are annoyed by an unaccountable change in their tranquillity. They are a symbol for those men who likewise fail to comprehend and who regard the disruption of an established order as an unwarranted personal inconvenience. They represent also those innocents who must be affected by crimes which they have not committed, and by the inevitable cyclical course of history. The image is particularly good because of the contrasts it provides. These birds are wilder than the falcon; yet their flight, too, is circular, as the word reel connotes. But the word also suggests an unevenness, the chaos and disorder that have already begun; whereas widening gyre suggests that there is still regularity, that it is the moment before disintegration. The movement of the desert birds also provides a striking contrast with the sluggish, implacable progress of the Sphinx.

The conclusion comes with the poet's emergence from the dream-state. He has returned to reality, but, paradoxically, the only reality is the vision which has just hypnotized him. The world of which he is part is not one of illumination but of enveloping, hopeless darkness and disaster. Only when Yeats awakens does he understand the reality. The barbarism has been quelled by the Christian phase during twenty centuries of stony sleep since the birth of Christ (represented by the rocking cradle), but it has never expired. Its own period of quiescence has been disturbed into a nightmare by some other passionate yet temporary force of salutary faith. Now with man himself turned barbarian, it is time for the God of barbarians to reassert himself. Once again it is necessary to turn to the unpublished notes for clarification, for there is more to the association than the twenty centuries since the birth of Christ. Generally, according to Yeats, all the gyres complete their historical cycles in 2,000 years. At the moment of writing the gyre is attaining its widest, hence more objective expansion, unlike the period preceding the birth of Christ, in which the gyre was narrowing. The new phase, we may assume, will last approximately another 2,000 years, even as the phase which opened with the creation of the Sphinx and ended with the birth of Christ lasted 2,000 years. The new phase, furthermore, promises to be a barbaric one at its inception. Hence, Yeats conceives of an ironical transvaluation in which a cruel beast-deity will supplant a humane and just deity at Bethlehem, the source of Christianity.

We have already witnessed how the poem's meaning, though enlarged and enriched by the additional information about the gyres, supports interpretation without it. But that information, we have also seen, proves essential for a really satisfactory interpretation. Now it is pertinent to incorporate one more allusion, this time a topical one, for "The Second Coming" owes much of its creation to the Irish struggle for independence. The Easter Rising of 1916 took Yeats by surprise, when the Irish nationalists rebelled against English rule. Although his sympathies were for a free Ireland, he disliked the Bohemian society of Dublin and the revolutionary political beliefs which motivated the uprising. He revered the "big houses" of the country aristocracy, whose society was for him an achievement of civilization which symbolized for him an absolute of which he approved. The mob, as he wrote in "The Leaders of the Crowd," would Pull down established honour; and yet he felt compelled to support their action, however passively, for the future hopes of Ireland. Practically, also, he recognized that the execution of the rebel leaders, the "Sixteen Dead Men," had made martyrs of them and that the purpose of the Rising could not be discussed dispassionately. So torn by his conflicting sentiments, Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" as the culmination of a series of political poems: "September, 1913," "Easter, 1916," and "The Rose."

Considered from this point of view, "The Second Coming" is an indication that for Yeats the noble aspirations of the Easter Rising had degenerated into the aimless brutal warfare of the Blacks and Tans and that, in turn, into the fight between the Free-Staters and the Republicans. Ultimately, political ideologies seemed to have little significance. The poem, thus, may be read as a prophetic commentary upon the decay of modern civilization. But it may also be read for its historical-topical significance as it reflects the blood-letting of civil upheaval. Note, then, that the widening gyre may be related to the sanguinary events in Ireland, because in Yeats' philosophy objectivity also applies to the moment in the historical cycle when political activity denies the integrity of the individual. We are now able to see that Yeats protests against the dissolution of order in Ireland as Mere anarchy, and that The blood-dimmed tide may be interpreted with reference to that conflict. Supplemented by our new information, The ceremony of innocence may be read as a direct allusion to political grievances; in this phrase is encompassed the notion that the innocent as well as the guilty are sacrificed. The somber closing lines lead to the conclusion that a new absolute—the rough beast—perhaps not so salutary as the old established order, is coming to dominate the next cycle of man's history.

Both the "private" and supplementary details have immediate topical bearing only upon the first stanza, which is expository and dramatic, and which sets the mood and tone; they also clarify the intention of prophetic warning. To re-emphasize the point, the poem has no absolute dependence of meaning on these augmenting details. Knowledge of these matters, however, ultimately becomes indispensable, since it gives the poem tremendous depth and exploits the imagery to its fullest. With these elements in mind, further, we come close to the full meaning of "The Second Coming," which is a masterpiece of complexity.

NOTES

¹ "The Second Coming" (from Michael Robartes and the Dancer, 1921) is reproduced with the kind permission of The Macmillan Company. The present text is from The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1940).

² Yeats' previously unpublished notes and other illuminating data about the gyres are available in W. B. Yeats, Man and Poet, by A. Norman Jeffares (London, 1949), pp. 196 ff. See also T. R. Henn, The Lonely Tower (London, 1950), pp. 182ff.