We see it throughout the first stanza: Yeats’ words take on an edge of doomed and destroyed innocence (‘things fall apart, the center cannot hold’). This is the same manipulation of imagery, using the innocent vision of nature to imply a great warping in the fabric of things as they should have been. In Macbeth, when the villainous Macbeth murders the good king, a lowly porter recognizes that the horses have started to eat each other and that there was a great and thunderous storm. It’s a particularly Shakespearian tactic to reflect evil in the way that nature behaves. They are incredibly smart, and dedicated to their trainers, responding immediately to any noise that their handler makes, thus for the falcon to have flown so rapidly out of the reach of the falconer shows us how the delicate balance of the world has been upset. ‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer’.įalcons were used as hunting animals since the medieval era. It opens up with the disturbance of nature. In Yeats’ poem, the apocalypse is a much quieter, more understated, affair. Much has been written on the apocalypse, and many of those writings focus on the harbingers of the event: it is always bloody and massive, a vicious explosion that shakes the world to its foundation. The best lack all conviction, while the worst The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere Things fall apart the centre cannot hold This poem is the literary version of that: a lack of ability to think of a time before the war. The First World War had shaken the foundations of knowledge for many, and scarred from the knowledge of the ‘war to end all wars’, they could no longer reconcile themselves with a time before the Great War. Rife with Christian imagery, and pulling much inspiration from apocalyptic writing, Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’ tries to put into words what countless people of the time felt: that it was the end of the world as they knew it and that nothing else would ever be the same again. ‘The Second Coming’ was William Butler Yeats’ ode to the era.

Slouching towards bethlehem