NAME: _______________________________________

THE SECOND COMING

William Butler Yeats (pub. 1921)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre1

The falcon cannot hear the falconer2;
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 Coming3! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi4
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man5,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind 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 toward Bethlehem6 to be born?

Critical Thinking Questions

1. Re-read and annotate the poem. Be sure to:

a. Line and stanza numbers.
b. Note the mood of the poem.
c. Consider how the use of imagery in the poem.

1 gyre- circle or cycle

2 Falconfalconer- reference to the sport of falconry (training falcons for hunting)

3 Second Coming- The return of Jesus at the end of the world

4 Spiritus Mundi- Latin for "the world spirit"

5 A reference to the sphinx

6 Bethlehem- the birthplace of Jesus

2. What picture of the state of the world does the speaker draw in stanza 1? How does the
speaker feel about these changes?
3. What does the opening of stanza 2 predict?
4. Why do you think Achebe chose to take the title of his book from this poem? How is the
world of Things Fall Apart similar to the world Yeats describes in stanza 1? What ushers in
a new cycle for the Igbo?