As I've stated before in class, "The Second Coming" one of my absolute favorite poems for a variety of reasons. I find its ancient, meaningful imagery and historical implications very fascinating. The poem is by far one of Yeats' most famous, and it is a perfect example of his complex belief system. Yeats' belief that history works in roughly 2,000 year cycles (gyres) that replaced one another is but strange and enthralling. On one hand, it is easy to say "Wow, he was crazy!" yet at the same it is impossible to ingnore the parallels between what is described in his work and what has happened in the real world.
While maybe Western civilization most likely won't end completely it is going thru a huge transformation that began about the time the poem was written. The poem could also refer to such things as the rise of Nazism and Communism. The thing is, however, that the poem was written before these historical changes really became evident in the world. This gives the poem an nearly prophetic tone to it and hilights its significance as a twentieth century piece of literature.
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