The second coming

The second coming

 
   

                                            William Butler Yeats  was an Irish poet, and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served as an Irish Senator for two terms, and was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others.

                                     The poem begins with the image of a falcon flying out of earshot from its human master. In medieval times, people would use falcons or hawks to track down animals at ground level. In this image, however, the falcon has gotten itself lost by flying too far away, which we can read as a reference to the collapse of traditional social arrangements in Europe at the time Yeats was writing. at the end of the poem, the speaker asks a rhetorical question which really amounts to a prophecy that the beast is on its way to Bethlehem, the birthplace of Christ, to be born into the world.

                   Themes

·      THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ART AND POLITICS

·      THE IMPACT OF FATE AND THE DIVINE ON HISTORY

·      THE TRANSITION FROM ROMANTICISM TO MODERNISM