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: Yeats wrote “The Second Comeing” just after the great war. World war I had a mive death toll. Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," written in 1919 and published in 1921 in his collection of poems “Michael Robartes and the Dance”. The poem was written during the time when World War I as well as the Russian Revolution and the Black-and-Tan War in Ireland were happing. He saw all of the social trouble from the wars and the destruction they caused as well as Ireland fight to free its self from England. Yeats seems to always incorporate Irish nationalism, Celtic mythology, love, ageing and mysticism in to most of his works and “The Second Coming” is no exception. : “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/ The falcon cannot hear the falconer;” refers to the loss of control. The falcon, which is a bird of prey, no longer listens to it master. It is as if something that was once used for good now has turned and is used for destruction. The falcon is symbolic of human technology going beyond human control. The falcon is the people moving away from god and going back to their pagan roots . The falcon is also reprehensive of society getting further and further from what is familiar and normal and become lost and disorientated. The falcon can also be seen as a symbol of Ireland and the fact they do not know what England the falconer is doing. The next line, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” I think is a parallel of the circling falcon and Yeats’ cycling theory. Yeats believed that history was divided up into two thousand year cycles. One cycle was emotional where as its opposing was rational, both are intertwined. The start of the cycle was marked by the birth of Christ. . The falcon is the people moving away from god and going back to their pagan roots the cycling also coincided with the chance from one central god to paganism. : "for then there will be a great tribulation, such as has not occurred since the beginning of the world until now, nor ever shall." Matthew 24:21 It is thought before the second coming the world would be in anarchy. In Ireland many riots were waged and many lives lost. Yeats wrote about one such riot Easter 1916 “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 pionate intensity.” These lines show more expanses of death and destruction. It also points out how the 2 cycles meet and what havoc they reek on the world. It seems there is much bloodshed, and there is so many negative things happening at this time. No innocence has survived. It seems it is the start of an emotional age but a lack of action. : A manticore is “A shape with lion body and the head of a man,” In the Middle Ages manticore became the symbol of tyranny, disparagement and envy. The mouth is filled with three rows of razor-sharp teeth and the scaled tail ends in a ball with poisonous darts. The monster stalks through the forest in search of humans. Upon an encounter with a human, the manticore fires a volley of darts at the victim, who dies immediately. This unfortunate person is devoured completely, even the bones and clothing, as well as the possessions this person carried, vanish. When a villager has completely disappeared, this is considered proof of the presence of a manticore. It is ultimately the embodiment of evil. “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” The beast is the exact opposite of Christ. Just as the birth of Christ signified the beginning of rational era the beast signifies the being of the opposing, emotional era. The other posiblity for the beast could be the Greek Sphinx. She was a demon of death and destruction and bad luck. It was a female creature, sometimes depicted as a winged lion with a feminine head, and sometimes as a female with the , paws and claws of a lion, a snake tail and bird wings. She sat on a high rock near Thebes and posed a riddle to all who ped. The riddle was: "What animal is that which in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?" She strangled those who could not solve the riddle. A man finally figured it out “Man, who in childhood creeps on hands and knees, in manhood walks , and in old age with the aid of a staff." The Sphinx was so mortified at the solving of her riddle that she cast herself down from the rock and perished. On the other hand the male Sphinx represent a king in his appearance as the sun god. The name "sphinx" was applied to the portraits of kings by the Greeks who visited Egypt in later centuries, because of the similarity of these statues to their Sphinx. All of these mythic animals are pagan symbols and could signify man getting back to his animal roots and away from god, going back to nature. : : “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” Shows the barrenness of the world. The heat causes things to slow down even the demon that’s stalks mankind. The birds intensify it feeling of impending doom. The birds are scavengers waiting to feed on those that scrum to the unrelenting sun on the baron land. : · Phillips, Brian. SparkNotes on Yeats's Poetry. 13 February 2003. <http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/yeats> : · Bornstein, George. Critical Essays on W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. Boston: Hall, 1986. : · Drake, Nicholas. The Poetry of W. B. Yeats. London: Penguin, 1991. : · Yeats: the Man and the Masks. New York: Macmillan, 1948 : · Josef Sila. Mystical Yeats. 20 february 2003. <http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8156/yeats.html>

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