Yeats' “Second Coming”: What Rough Beast?

“The Second Coming” is often regarded as a powerful poem, having special force even in the work of a man acknowledged to be a writer of much powerful verse. Denis Donoghue, speaking broadly of Yeats's poetry, argues that “the sense of power is the most pervasive sense at work in the poems,” a power before which the reader must “bend the knee.”1 Harold Bloom, in a discussion of “The Second Coming,” concerns himself primarily with “the nature of its power” (p. 317).2 Bloom points to serious confusions in the poem; its peculiar twistings of Christian myth make the poem “a masquerade of Yeats's Gnosticism in Christian terms” (p. 342). He concludes, that“the power of The Second Coming is not called in question by these smaller questions, but perhaps its artistry is” (p. 323). This paper investigates the power of “The Second Coming” in terms of the role played by the experience of power as a necessary dimension of human relationships, particularly in the conditions of infancy and childhood.

Bloom writes: “There is something in the power of The Second Coming that persuades us of our powerlessness” (p. 324). This reading assumes a radical split between the imagination that created the poem and those that are stirred by readings of it. The poem presents an image of destructive, historical force before which we, as readers, are helpless, but with which Yeats, as creator, is identified. Yeats participates in a sense of power that his readers experience as hostile and alien. As Ivor Winners has it: “Yeats approves of this kind of brutality.”3

Certainly “The Second Coming” presents an ominous image of historical process. I find the poem distressing, often,