eatsThe poem “The Second Coming” was written in 1919 and is included in the collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer(1921). Harmon (1998) lists “The Second Coming” as one of the hundred most anthologized poems in the English language. It was first printed in The Dial (1920).  Written after the First World War; it utilizes elements of Christianity like the apocalypse and the second coming to depict post-war Europe. Critics like Richard Ellman and Harold Bloom have proposed that the text pertains to the Russian Revolution of 1917.The poem is penned in rough iambic pentameter.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

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 out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.…