Imagery

The Poem:

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
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 Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
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
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


Second Coming: The second coming is what the bible teaches us about. It's supposed to be the return of Jesus from heaven to earth; an event filled with Messianic prophecies. It's something that Jesus promised and is thought to occur when the world is in need of a righteous ruler. The stories and teachings in the bible are supposed to give a sense of the second coming and how Jesus is supposed to restore order in a chaotic and disorganized earth.

The speaker of the poem believes the world is in the midst of chaos where there is no control and a second coming where the Messiah is supposed to restore order is near, but is going to occur in a much more troubling image. In this poem, unlike Yeats' usual rhyme scheme poetry, it has no rhyme scheme which shows the disorder and chaos that is taking place in the poem. The imagery used throughout the poem helpus us imagine the second coming, but in a less traditional sense. The visual imagery of the Messiah's lion body and head of a man helps the reader establish a visual image of this different second coming. Taking palce in a desert, the messiah is thought to come when the world is in need of a righteous King who will restore order but this Messiah's view contain no mery and is mercilless.