The Rough Beast Slouches: Deconstructing Yeats's 'The Second Coming'

In the wake of World War I and the devastating 1918 flu pandemic, the Irish poet William Butler Yeats looked upon a world in transition and saw not the peaceful dawn of a new era, but a terrifying and inevitable shift in the cycles of history. Published in 1920, his poem 'The Second Coming' has since become one of the most quoted and haunting works of the 20th century.

First, let us hear the poem in its entirety, exactly as Yeats wrote it:

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?

The Concept of the Gyre

To understand this poem, one must understand Yeats's unique and often occult-driven view of history. The first reference we encounter is the 'widening gyre.' For Yeats, a gyre was a spiraling cone representing a 2,000-year cycle of history. He believed that as one historical cycle—such as the era of Christianity—reaches its widest point, it begins to collapse, and a new, opposing cycle begins to emerge from its center.

A Society in Decay

The image of the 'falcon' that cannot hear the 'falconer' serves as a metaphor for this loss of control. The bird, symbolizing humanity or society, has flown so far into the expanding spiral that it can no longer hear the guiding voice of its traditional master or its moral foundation. This leads to the famous line, 'the centre cannot hold,' a phrase that has come to define periods of political and social upheaval.

The Vision of Spiritus Mundi

In the second stanza, Yeats introduces the term 'Spiritus Mundi.' This is Latin for 'World Spirit.' Yeats believed in a collective unconscious or a 'great memory' of the human race that stores archetypal images. It is from this storehouse that he draws the vision of the 'rough beast.'

This beast—described as having a 'lion body and the head of a man'—is a clear reference to the Great Sphinx of Giza. However, in Yeats's vision, this is not a dormant monument but a living, 'pitiless' force of nature. It represents an era that is the antithesis of the Christian values of the previous two millennia. When Yeats mentions 'twenty centuries of stony sleep,' he is referring to the time since the birth of Christ. The 'rocking cradle' represents the Nativity in Bethlehem, which Yeats suggests has 'vexed' the ancient, pagan forces of the Sphinx into a 'nightmare' state.

The Dark Prophecy

The poem concludes with a chilling reversal of the traditional Christian 'Second Coming.' Instead of the return of a savior, Yeats envisions a 'rough beast' slouching toward 'Bethlehem.' By placing this monstrous, primordial figure at the site of Christ's birth, Yeats suggests that the next 2,000-year cycle will be defined by a power that is alien, cold, and fundamentally different from anything the modern world has known.