"The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920, and afterwards included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to allegorically describe the atmosphere of post-war Europe. It is considered a major work of modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.
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Historical context
The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence that followed the Easter Rising, at a time before the British Government decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland. Yeats used the phrase "the second birth" instead of "the Second Coming" in his first drafts. The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic. In the weeks preceding Yeats's writing of the poem, his pregnant wife Georgie Hyde-Lees caught the virus and was very close to death. The highest death rates of the pandemic were among pregnant women—in some areas, they had up to a 70 percent death rate. While his wife was convalescing, he wrote "The Second Coming".
Influence
Phrases and lines from the poem are used in many works, in a variety of media, such as literature, motion pictures, television and music. Examples of works whose titles draw from "The Second Coming" include: Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart ; Joan Didion's essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem ; Robert B. Parker's novel The Widening Gyre ; the 1996 non-fiction bookSlouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline by Robert Bork; the song "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" by Joni Mitchell from her 1991 albumNight Ride Home; by Lou Reed in his preamble to the song "Sweet Jane" on the 1978 album ; the episode "Revelations" of the science fiction television series Babylon 5; The Roots LP Things Fall Apart, released in 1999; Harry Turtledove's novel '; the 2003 game Slouching Towards Bedlam; the Star TrekeBook collection Mere Anarchy, Elyn Saks' autobiography The Center Cannot Hold ; The Sopranos episode "The Second Coming" ; the Altan album ' ; the Ben Frost LP The Centre Cannot Hold ; When the Center Held, a 2018 memoir by Donald Rumsfeld of the Gerald Ford presidency; and the Sleater-Kinney LP The Center Won't Hold, released in 2019, 100 years after Yeats wrote the poem. Stephen King's novel The Stand references the poem numerous times, with one character explicitly quoting lines from it. A 2016 analysis by research company Factiva showed that lines from the poem were quoted more often in the first seven months of 2016 than in any of the preceding 30 years. In the context of increased terrorist violence, and political turmoil in the Western world after the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States of America shortly thereafter, commentators repeatedly invoked its lines: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."
