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?
To understand Yeats' cosmology it is essential to read his book A Vision where he explained his views on history and how it informed his poetry. Yeats saw human history as a series of epochs, what he called "gyres." He saw the age of classical antiquity as beginning with the Trojan War and then that thousand year cycle was overtaken by the Christian era, which is coming to a close. And that is the basis of the final line of the poem, "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last/ Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
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, but she survived. The highest death rates of the pandemic were among pregnant women, who in some areas had a death rate of up to 70%. Yeats wrote the poem while his wife was convalescing.[6][1]
In popular culture
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 which reference "The Second Coming" (titles, quotes, etc.) include:
The director's cut of the 1995 film
Nixon includes a scene where Director of Central Intelligence
Richard Helms recites a portion of the poem to President
Richard Nixon.[11]
The season 5 episode "Cold Cuts" (9 May 2004) of the television series The Sopranos, in which Dr. Jennifer Melfi quotes two lines from the poem, as well as the season 6 episode "
The Second Coming" (20 May 2007) in which
A.J. Soprano reads and quotes the poem while struggling with depression. A.J. quotes the poem again in the series finale "
Made In America".[14]
Jonathan Alter's 2013 political biography of
Barack Obama, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies also cites Yeats's poem.[15]
A chapter is entitled "The Centre Cannot Hold", in the 2014 book of UK political analysis The Blunders of Our Governments by
Anthony King and
Ivor Crewe.[16]
The title of the BBC podcast series Things Fell Apart (2021) by
Jon Ronson[23]
Economic historian
Brad DeLong references the phrase "Slouches towards Bethlehem" in the title of his 2022 book Slouching Towards Utopia[24]
The 2024
BBC One drama The Way referenced and quoted the poem, during its depiction of the collapse of civil society in Wales following a riot in
Port Talbot.[25][26]
^Childs, Peter (2007). Modernism. The New Critical Idiom (2nd ed.). Routledge. p. 39.
ISBN978-0-41541546-0.
^Haughey, Jim (2002). The First World War in Irish Poetry. Bucknell University Press. p. 161.
ISBN978-1-61148151-8.
^Deane, Seamus (1998). "Boredom and Apocalypse". Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing Since 1790. Clarendon lectures in English literature. Clarendon Press. p. 179.
ISBN978-0-19818490-4.
^Hollywood Confidential. Los Angeles: Paramount Television. 1997. 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?