Themes in The Second Coming

 

Themes in the poem “The Second Coming”   1.  Civilization, Chaos and Control:

“The Second Coming” presents a nightmarish apocalyptic scenario, as the speaker describes human  beings’ increasing loss of control and tendency towards towards violence and anarchy.  anarchy.  “The Second Coming” actually has a simple message: it basically predicts that time is up for humanity, and that civilization as we know it is about to be undone. Yeats wrote this poem right after World War I, a global catastrophe that killed millions of people. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that the poem paints a bleak picture of humanity, suggesting that civilization’s sense of  progress and order is only an illusion. The “falconer,” representing humanity’s attempt to control its world, has lost its “falcon” in the turning “gyre” (the gyre is an image Yeats uses to symbolize grand, sweeping historical movements as a kind of spiral). These lines also suggest how the modern world has distanced people from nature (represented here here by the falcon) and it’s clear that that whatever connection between falcon and falconer has broken, and now the human world is spiralling into chaos. Indeed, the poem suggests that though humanity might have looked like it was making progress over the past “twenty centuries” through ever -increasing -increasing knowledge and scientific developments, the First World War proved people to be as capable of self-destruction self- destruction as ever. The “best” people lack “conviction,” they're not bothering to do anything about this nightmarish reality, while the “worst” people people seem excited and eager for destruction. The current state of the world, according to the speaker, proves that the "centre" — that that is, the foundation of society — was was never very strong. In other words, humanity’s supposed arc of progress has been an illusion. illusion . Whether the poem means that humanity has lost its way or never knew it to begin with is unclear, but either way the promises of modern society — of of safety, security, and human dignity — have have proven empty. And in their place, a horrific creature has emerged.  This Second Coming is clearly not Jesus, but instead a “rough  beast” that humanity itself has woken up by the incessant noise of its many wars wars.. . With this final image of the beast, the poem indicates that while humanity

seemed

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civilized in the 2,000 years that followed Christ's birth, in reality people have been sowing the seeds of their own destruction all along. This “rough beast” is now “pitilessly” slouching toward the birthplace of Jesus —likely in order to usher in a new age of “darkness” and “nightmare.” “nightmare.”  

 2.   Mysticism and the Occult Occult Yeats had a deep fascination with mysticism and the occult, and his poetry is infused with a sense of the otherworldly, the spiritual, and the unknown. Mysticism figures prominently in Yeats’s discussion of the reincarnation of the soul, as well as in his philosophical model of the conical

 

gyres used to explain the journey of the soul, the passage of time, and the guiding hand of fate. Mysticism and the occult occur again and again in Yeats’s poetry, most explicitly in “The Second Coming” but also in poems such as “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Magi” (1916). ( 1916). The rejection of Christian principles in favor of a more supernatural approach to spirituality creates a unique flavor in Yeats’s poetry that impacts his discussion of history, politics, and love.    3.  The Impact of Fate and the Divine on History Yeats’s devotion to mysticism led to the development of a unique spiritual and philosophical system that emphasized the role of fate and historical determinism, or the belief that events have  been preordained. Yeats had rejected Christianity early in his life, but his lifelong study of mythology, Theosophy, spiritualism, philosophy, and the occult demonstrate his profound interest in the divine and how it interacts with humanity. Over the course of his life, he created a complex system of spirituality, using the image of interlocking gyres (similar to spiral cones) to map out the development and reincarnation of the soul. Yeats believed that history was determined by fate and that fate revealed its plan in moments when the human and divine interact. A Tone of historically determined inevitability permeates his poems, particularly in descriptions of situations of human and divine interaction.