The Second Coming

"The Second Coming", written by William Butler Yeats, grabbed my interest as I read it.  I thought it was unusual that the poem's form was so irregular.  There were no end-rhymes included in the poem and it read like a moment in time that was captured.  These literary choices by Yeats led me to believe that he must have had a motive in writing this poem the way he did.  In my opinion, he wrote "The Second Coming" so strangely to make it more mysterious.  "The Second Coming" is intentionally ambiguous to allow the reader to make their own assumptions about the meaning.

When I hear the phrase "Second Coming", I immediately think of Christ's Second Coming.  Even though it is clear that Yeats is not referring to Christ specifically, the phrase "second coming" means that a transition of some kind is occurring.  We live in times of unknown circumstances.  The world is changing rapidly, and at the time Yeats wrote this poem, he was witnessing the Irish Civil War unraveling and the damage World War I had caused.  We cannot control the future, but we can attempt to make a change if we see things starting to go awry.  The "rocking cradle" towards the end of the poem is a symbol of hope and rebirth.  If we change our ways, we have the ability to change the world and the direction it is heading. 

My favorite line of the poem is, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity."  To me, this line is a call to action.  If we have an idea to change the world for the better, we need to share it with others.  So many wonderful ideas have probably been buried with their creators.  People with thoughts of evil are the ones who live to get their point across and change others for the worst.  We need to reverse this and circulate positive thoughts to others.

The beast that is depicted in the poem is "a shape with lion body and the head of a man."  I see this hybrid beast as a representation of man's transformation.  Yeats is showing that slowly but surely, humans are changing into harsh animals without a conscience.  With war and devastation, we lose our humanity a little each time.  Soon, things will fall apart.  "The centre cannot hold" forever, and if we continue down the path we are headed, "mere anarchy" will control the world.  I may be a bit far out in my interpretations, but I took Yeats' ambiguous theme as an invitation to attach my own ideas to the poem.  After reading through the poem a few times,  I still feel the same way about it as I did at the beginning.  I think that Yeats' point was to show that the future is a mystery, as is the true meaning of his poem.