MICHAEL ROBARTES AND THE DANCER

This 1921 anthology includes one of Yeats’ most famous poems.  The Second Coming was composed in 1919 and printed in The Dial the following year. The poem adopts Christian imagery of the Apocalypse and the second coming of Christ as an allegory to describe the atmosphere in post-war Europe. Now considered a major work of Modernist poetry, the poem has been construed as representing the French Revolutions, the Irish rebellion and the Russian Revolution of 1917.

In the early drafts of the poem, Yeats used the title The Second Birth, but substituted the phrase The Second Coming, opting for a reference to the Book of Revelation. However, instead of the appearance of Christ in the poem, Yeats describes a ‘rough beast’, suggesting The Beast in Revelation and the figure of the Antichrist. This sphinx-like beast had long captivated Yeats’ imagination. He later wrote in the introduction to his play The Resurrection, “I began to imagine as always at my left side, just out of the range of sight, a brazen winged beast which I associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction”, noting that the beast was “afterwards described in my poem The Second Coming.” Since its first publication in 1920, the poem has intrigued readers across the world, encouraging many different interpretations of the enigmatic imagery.