poetry texts, poem archive at plagiarist.com

Yeat’s vision of the second coming is the complete opposite of the Christian belief. He believes that because the “gyre” of the last 2000-year cycle has ended in death, destruction and a disregard for human life (ww1 and he foresaw the rise of fascism and ww2) he believes an anti-Christ will rise as a result, with the “shape [of a] lion body and the head of a man” (Egyptian sphinx). This creature will bring death and anarchy. He also mocks Christianity when he mimics desperate pleas for the second coming of christ in the beginning of the second stanza.

The second coming represents the end of the gyre that began, for Yeats, with the rape of Leda and the Trojan War which signaled the dawn of civilization. Even thought Yeats personal philosophy was a far cry from Christianity, Christian images still abound in his poetry.