NON-AFRICAN POETRY Discuss the theme of change in Yeat's "The Second Coming."

Answer Details

W. B. Yeats's "The Second Coming," written in the aftermath of the First World War, is a prophetic vision of violent, sweeping change. Its theme of change is that of a whole civilisation collapsing and giving way to a terrifying new age, and the poet develops this idea through powerful images of disintegration and rebirth.

Change as disintegration. The poem opens with the famous image of the falcon that "cannot hear the falconer" as it spirals outward in a "widening gyre." This broken bond between falcon and master symbolises the breakdown of order and control. The change Yeats describes is a loss of coherence: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." The old structures that once held society together, authority, faith, moral certainty, are dissolving.

Change as the loss of moral direction. Yeats presents the transformation as a moral crisis. "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," a "blood-dimmed tide" drowns "the ceremony of innocence," and, most tellingly, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity." The good have grown weak and doubtful, while the wicked act with fanatical energy. Change here means the inversion of values.

Change as apocalyptic rebirth. The second stanza turns from collapse to prophecy. Convinced that "the Second Coming is at hand," the persona sees not the return of Christ but a monstrous new deity rising from the "Spiritus Mundi": a sphinx-like shape with "a lion body and the head of a man," its gaze "blank and pitiless as the sun." This is Yeats's vision of a new historical cycle (a new "gyre") replacing the two-thousand-year Christian era with something brutal and inhuman.

The cyclical view of history. The theme of change rests on Yeats's belief that history moves in great cycles that succeed one another through violence. The poem ends with the chilling question of what "rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born," suggesting that the coming age will be born in dread rather than hope.

Conclusion. "The Second Coming" thus treats change as catastrophic and inevitable: the disintegration of the modern world and the violent birth of a new, fearful order. Yeats captures the anxiety of an age that felt its whole civilisation slipping into chaos.