The Second Coming (poem)

Based on Wikipedia: The Second Coming (poem)

In 1919, as his pregnant wife lay close to death from the flu, William Butler Yeats sat down and wrote twenty-two lines of poetry that would haunt the twentieth century and beyond. His wife survived. The poem, "The Second Coming," became what critic Harold Bloom called "one of the most universally admired poems of our century" and what David Ross later described as "one of the most famous poems in the English language."

The final image still sends shivers down spines: a rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

What makes this poem so enduring? Why do its phrases keep appearing in book titles, song lyrics, and political speeches more than a century after Yeats first drafted it? The answer lies in how perfectly the poem captured a moment of civilizational anxiety—and how that anxiety never really went away.

A World Unraveling

To understand "The Second Coming," you need to understand 1919. The First World War had just ended, leaving roughly seventeen million people dead and the old European order shattered. The empires that had seemed permanent fixtures of civilization—the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, the Russian—had collapsed or were collapsing. In Ireland, where Yeats lived, the Easter Rising of 1916 had sparked a war for independence that was growing bloodier by the month. The Black and Tans—the brutal British paramilitary force that would terrorize the Irish countryside—had not yet arrived, but their coming was inevitable.

And then there was the flu.

The 1918-1919 influenza pandemic killed somewhere between fifty and one hundred million people worldwide, far more than the war itself. It struck with terrifying randomness, often killing the young and healthy while sparing the elderly. Pregnant women were especially vulnerable—in some areas, their death rate reached seventy percent.

Yeats's wife Georgie was pregnant when she caught the virus. For weeks, she hovered between life and death while Yeats watched helplessly. She eventually recovered, and while she was convalescing, Yeats wrote his poem. You can feel the aftermath of that terror in its opening lines:

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

A gyre is a spiral—think of water going down a drain, or a falcon circling ever wider above its master's glove. Yeats saw history itself as a series of gyres, great spiral cycles that wind outward until they collapse and a new cycle begins.

Yeats's Theory of History

This wasn't just poetic fancy. Yeats had developed an elaborate cosmology, which he laid out in his 1925 book "A Vision." His theory divided human history into two-thousand-year epochs, each defined by its relationship to the epoch before it.

The age of classical antiquity, in Yeats's view, began with the Trojan War and lasted roughly a thousand years. That world—the world of Greek heroes and Roman emperors—was overtaken by the Christian era, which began with the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem. And now, Yeats believed, that Christian age was winding down, its gyre reaching its widest point before collapsing into something new.

But what comes next?

That's the terrifying question at the heart of the poem. The Second Coming in Christian theology refers to the return of Jesus Christ to judge the living and the dead. But Yeats's second coming is something else entirely—an "antithetical dispensation," the opposite of the Christian age. If the Christian era began with a divine child born to a virgin, attended by angels and wise men, what would its opposite look like?

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The word "slouches" does a tremendous amount of work in that line. It suggests something bestial, careless, perhaps half-asleep as it shambles toward its destiny. There's no divine plan here, no angelic announcement—just an ancient, pitiless creature whose time has come round again.

The Sphinx in the Desert

The beast in the poem is described as having "a lion body and the head of a man"—a sphinx. This was no accident. Yeats was deeply influenced by the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and critics have traced the poem's imagery directly to Shelley's "Ozymandias," that famous sonnet about a shattered statue in the Egyptian desert.

In Shelley's poem, the ruined sphinx bears an inscription: "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" But the works are gone, swallowed by the sand. The message is about the impermanence of human power and achievement.

Yeats reverses the image. His sphinx is not a ruin but a living creature, awakening after "twenty centuries of stony sleep." The irony is pointed: the sphinx slept through the entire Christian era, dreaming its slow dreams while civilizations rose and fell. Now, "vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle"—by the birth of Christ itself—it finally stirs.

The first stanza of the poem consciously echoes the tone and syntax of Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," another work about the end of one divine order and the beginning of another. Yeats was not just influenced by the Romantic poets; he was in dialogue with them, extending their questions into a new century that had its own reasons for apocalyptic anxiety.

A Poem That Keeps Meaning

What's remarkable about "The Second Coming" is how it keeps finding new relevance. Yeats wrote it about the collapse of the old European order, but readers in the 1930s saw it as prophecy of fascism. In the 1960s, it spoke to civil rights struggles and Vietnam. After September 11, 2001, the poem circulated widely online. During the political turmoil of the 2010s, its phrases appeared in countless editorials and speeches.

The poem doesn't just predict catastrophe; it captures the feeling of living through one. The sense that the old certainties are dissolving, that the center cannot hold, that some unnamed horror is approaching—these feelings recur in every generation, and Yeats found the words for them.

This is why the poem's phrases have become cultural touchstones, borrowed and adapted across every medium.

Things Fall Apart

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe chose "Things Fall Apart" as the title of his 1958 masterpiece about the destruction of Igbo society by British colonialism. The connection to Yeats is both homage and implicit critique—here was an African writer using the words of an Irish poet to describe the violence of European empire, turning Yeats's anxieties about Western civilization back on the West itself.

The hip-hop group The Roots used the same title for their 1999 album, creating a double reference—to Yeats through Achebe. Journalist Jon Ronson borrowed the phrase again for his 2021 podcast series "Things Fell Apart," about the culture wars of the internet age. The line keeps resonating because things keep falling apart.

The Centre Cannot Hold

Elyn Saks, a legal scholar with schizophrenia, titled her 2008 memoir "The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness." The phrase perfectly captured her experience of mental illness as a dissolution of the self, the mind's center failing to hold against chaos.

Joan Didion used a variation for her 2017 Netflix documentary, "The Center Will Not Hold." Political journalist Jonathan Alter titled his book about Barack Obama's first term "The Center Holds"—implying that it might not have, that the center holding was an achievement rather than a given. The rock band Sleater-Kinney called their 2019 album "The Center Won't Hold."

Even the composer Junkie XL borrowed the phrase for a track in Zack Snyder's 2021 "Justice League," combining it with another line from the poem: "The Center Will Not Hold, Twenty Centuries of Stony Sleep."

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

No phrase from the poem has traveled further than its final image. Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (1968), a collection of essays about California in the 1960s, is now considered one of the great works of American literary journalism. Didion captured the strange dissolution of that decade—the Haight-Ashbury hippies, the Manson murders, the sense of a culture drifting toward something it couldn't name.

Joni Mitchell set the entire poem to music on her 1991 album "Night Ride Home," under the title "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Conservative judge Robert Bork adapted the phrase for his 1996 cultural critique "Slouching Towards Gomorrah," arguing that American society was collapsing into moral chaos. Brad DeLong, an economic historian, used "Slouching Towards Utopia" for his 2022 history of the twentieth century, recasting Yeats's beast as the uncertain promise of economic progress.

The interactive fiction game "Slouching Towards Bedlam" (2003), set in a Victorian asylum where language itself becomes a contagion, plays on the phrase with a pun—Bethlehem Hospital, known as Bedlam, was London's infamous psychiatric institution.

Other Borrowings

Walker Percy titled his 1980 novel "The Second Coming," directly invoking Yeats. Robert B. Parker's 1983 detective novel "The Widening Gyre" takes its name from the poem's first line. Journalist Amos Elon called his 1997 essay collection about Israeli-Palestinian conflict "A Blood-Dimmed Tide," borrowing from another line: "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed." Electronic musician Moby drew multiple song titles from the poem for his 2018 album.

The poem has been quoted extensively in works as different as Arthur Schlesinger's 1949 political manifesto "The Vital Center" and Stephen King's 1978 horror novel "The Stand." It appears in television shows from "Babylon 5" to "The Sopranos" to "Devs." Irish singer Hozier quoted the slouching beast in his song "NFWMB."

The range of these borrowings is itself significant. The poem speaks to political centrists and radicals, to horror writers and literary journalists, to hip-hop artists and historians. It's not partisan; it's pre-partisan, concerned with something more fundamental than policy disagreements.

Why It Lasts

Yeats was onto something. Not about history's actual structure—there's no evidence that civilizations actually move in two-thousand-year cycles—but about how change feels from inside.

Every generation experiences moments when the familiar order seems to be dissolving. The specific anxieties change: world war, pandemic, political upheaval, technological disruption, climate crisis. But the feeling is remarkably consistent. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. The center cannot hold. Something is coming that we cannot name or stop.

What Yeats captured was not prophecy but recognition. He found the images and rhythms that let us see our own anxieties reflected back at us. The rough beast is always slouching toward some Bethlehem or other. The question is what gets born when it arrives.

Yeats's wife survived the flu. Ireland won its independence, though not without terrible violence. The twentieth century brought horrors that exceeded even the aftermath of World War One—and also unprecedented human flourishing. History is not kind enough to give us neat endings.

But the poem endures because the feeling endures. Whenever things fall apart, whenever the center wavers, we reach for Yeats's words. They don't offer comfort exactly. They offer something better: the recognition that others have stood where we stand, staring into an uncertain future, and found the words to describe what they saw.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

We're still waiting to find out.