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The Second Coming (poem)

1919 poem by Irish poet W. B. Yeats

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Background

The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence in January 1919, which followed the Easter Rising in April 1916, and before the British government had decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland. This period also saw the 1918–1919 flu pandemic, which Yeats' pregnant wife, Georgie, contracted in the weeks preceding the authorship of "The Second Coming". The highest death rates of the pandemic were among pregnant women, who in some areas had a mortality rate of up to 70%, but Georgie survived. Yeats wrote the poem while his wife was convalescing. Yeats's cosmology is laid out in his book A Vision, where he explained his views on history and how it informed his poetry. Yeats saw human history as a series of epochs, what he called "gyres". Each of these eras began and ended with a gyration of spiritual forces, which he described as follows in A Vision:

A line is a symbol of time, and expresses a movement, symbolising the emotional subjective mind without extension in space; a plane, cutting the line at right angles, is spatial, the symbol of objectivity and intellect. A gyre is a combination of line and plane, and as one tendency or the other must always be stronger, the gyre is always expanding or contracting. The gyre is drawn as a cone which represents sometimes the individual soul and its history, sometimes general life. For this cone two cones are substituted since neither the soul of man or nature can be expressed without conflict.

This system of gyres, consequently, was fundamentally a system rooted in conflict between a society's tendencies and a distinct set of principles: every two millennia, one gyre widens and the other narrows to reach a point of crisis, whereupon a new system and civilization is born. Yeats used the phrase "the second birth" instead of "the Second Coming" in his first drafts, reflecting this idea of a new moral order being born from a time of crisis. To Yeats, one of these gyres, represented by Greco-Roman society, had been replaced by Christianity's set of values, but a reversion to the moral principles of Greek and Roman society was inevitable at the inflection point of the 20th century. For example, in "His Memories", one of Yeats' later poems, Yeats equates Maud Gonne, a woman he believed represented the apocalyptic moral turning point of the era, to Helen of Troy, to whom he attributed the death of Hector and destruction of Troy. Yeats deeply admired and frequently discussed the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, who described this reversal of the moral order due to Christianity in works such as On the Genealogy of Morality. The First World War and the beginning of war in Ireland only heightened these attitudes that the world was at an apocalyptic crisis point, where the world's moral order would be reversed.

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