'The Second Coming' is one of W. B. Yeats's most well-known poems. It was written amid the Irish War of Independence, in the aftermath of the Great War and the Spanish flu pandemic. The speaker senses that the world — that is, the present order of things — is coming apart at the seams. The reference to Bethlehem at the end does not look back to Christmas, but anticipates an anitchristmas with dread. It reads as follows:
It is often read as an expression of Europe's loss of hope in the Christian gospel following the Great War. The image of the downing of the ceremony of innocence — that is, baptism — inverts the rite of Christian initiation. It is an anit-baptism, the deconversion of Christendom. And, for the speaker of the poem, it is the harbinger of a terrible vision from out of the Spirit of the World. In Yeats's personal theory of poetry, the Spiritus Mundi refers to a common memory, not unlike Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, from which the archetypes and analogies known to virtually every human society. For Yeats it is the source of inspiration, the well-spring from which true artists drink. It can also refer, as it usually does in the scriptures, to the spirit that opposes the Spirit of Christ, 'the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience', 'according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air' (Ephesians 2:2). Out of this spirit — however conceptualized — arises a vision of a manticore.
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