[In the following essay, Proffitt contends that the "rough beast" of "The Second Coming" refers to the offspring of the sphinx-like desert creature in the poem.]

Yeats's "The Second Coming" must be one of the most widely explicated and paraphrased of poems. Still, its closure remains a mystery. If the "rough beast" spoken of at the end is the sphinx-like creature of lines 13-17, how can it be going to be born in Bethlehem when it has already been born in the desert? Indeed, how could any creature slouch toward the place where it is to be born?

Readers of the poem characteristically fudge this difficulty. For instance, in his otherwise exhaustive treatment, Richard P. Wheeler gets around the problem (ironically, because part of his title comes from line 21) by saying nothing about it at all or about the last two lines ("Yeats' 'Second Coming': What Rough Beast?" American Imago 31 [fall 1974]: 235-51). I, too, have fudged the matter when teaching the poem by saying, as other readers have held, that the beast is physically born in the desert but is to be born spiritually in Bethlehem. But that is a most unsatisfying conclusion. A. M. Gibbs comes closer to a satisfying solution in speaking of the "sexual hint in the ominous description of the beast 'moving his [sic] slow thighs'" ("The 'Rough Beasts' of Yeats and Shakespeare," Notes and Queries 17 [fall 1970]: 48-49). By focusing on the desert creature and its thighs, I have come, I think, to a tolerable solution.

In The Riddle of the Sphinx (London: Hogarth Press, 1934), Geza Roheim states that "The Sphinx .. . is the father and mother in one person" (22). There is our clue. Yeats's creature, though specified to have "the head of a man" (no such specification, of course, would be needed if the creature were simply to be taken as male), is female—as the focus on the "slow thighs" suggests—as well as male, or "the father and mother" at once. So, what "Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born" is not the desert creature but its child, slouching in utero in the fetal position. That makes sense. Moreover, this reading is much more frightening than any other I know, and Yeats clearly intended to convey a sense of fright. For we are left with no idea as to what the creature to be born will be. We are given a glimpse of the parent, but then "The darkness drops," and we are left to wonder how much more terrible its offspring might be. This reading also uncovers a symmetry between Mary and the creature that reflects the poem's title and makes it particularly appropriate.

All in all, by taking the poem's last line—"Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born"—to refer to the offspring of the desert creature rather than to the desert creature itself, we can conclude that Yeats's closure both makes sense and is satisfying. Its complexity, once understood, makes the poem seem especially rich and worthy of our attention.