Yeats: The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats in his poetry depicts the role of fate and the divine in history. One such poem that illustrates the oncoming storm that is preparing to alter history is The Second Coming. Yeats in The Second Coming abstractly with the divine. The divine does not take a defined shape, but is just referred to as the force that is bringing about change in the world.

"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 of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert" (line 9 -13).

Yeats uses the idea of The Second Coming to indicate that a change is bound to occur in the world. However, it is not the Second Coming of Christ, but of something else. Christ does not appear, but "a shape with lion body and the head of a man" (line 14). It is a beast, a creature unknown in the modern world. The beast represents the approaching change in the world. The idea of the world before is gone. The world was living in innocence before this time and now "innocence is drowned" (line 6). The world cannot return to the way it was before.

"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 toward Bethlehem to be born? (line 18-22).

The world has had "twenty centuries" to live in innocence and enjoy a similar life, but now the hour has come for change. The metamorphosis is looming off in the distance. The beast is approaching the world, and preparing "to be born" (line 22). Eventually, the world will be forced to shift because there are events in motion that will bring about this change. The transformation is being led by fate, and fate is now approaching Bethlehem preparing to unleash a fury upon the world.