At first glance, The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats appears to be referring to the return of Jesus Christ because of references to a “rocking cradle” and “Bethlehem.” However, a more thorough understanding of Yeats’ religion beliefs and the context of this poem reveal that even Yeats himself did not understand exactly what the Second Coming would entail. The Second Coming is less concerned with Christ's second coming and His rebirth, and more concerned with the death of the idea of Christ and the Christian ideal.
In 1925, Yeats wrote A Vision, which describes his religion - a complicated mix of “the occult, spiritualism fairy life and fairy tales, paganism, magic, seances, psychic phenomena, Eastern religion, Blavatsky, mysticism, and William Blake” (Frank 1). To Yeats, a gyre was a cyclical cosmic force which governed all events (drawn from his interest in Hinduism) and drew everything into a cycle of apocalypse and rebirth. Each gyre represents about two thousand years (Mann 1). At the time Yeats wrote this poem, he believed time was reaching the end of one gyre and everything would be reborn. Yeats believed society is no exception to this rebirth. The poem relates his own belief that Christian society is at its apocalypse and will be replaced. Yeats believed the Christian era, defined by peace and predictability, was quickly ending and would be replaced by an era of uncertainty and chaos. He believed WWI was the beginning of this chaos. Unlike the Christian era which was very predictable, this era had no Bible to map out what was coming next. The world would just have to wait to see what “rough beast” would arrive.
