William Butler Yeats wrote the poem “The Second Coming” as a response to the destruction of life in general following WWI. To fully understand the historical context of Yates’ poem, “The Second Coming”, one must first understand Yates’ religious and political views. Yates was brought up Christian, but as he grew older he became more and more interested in pagan religions. Before writing this poem, Yeats published a book called A Vision. This book discussed the world revolving in gyres as spoken of in line 1. These gyres are what Yeats concludes to be the cyclical progressions of time. Yeats believed that time periods flowed in 2000 years cycles. At the time this poem was written it was the end of the Christian Era and the beginning of something else. Yeats discusses a second coming as a means for saying that Christ will be reborn in this era only to be challenged by a sort of Antichrist (the sphinx).
This poem was written following WWI. Yeats was anti democracy and......
Join Now or Login to view the rest of this paper.
Approximate Word Count: 580
Approximate Pages: 3 (260 words per double-spaced page) |