Apocalyptic Vision in The Second Coming:
William Butler Yeats, the celebrated Irish poet, in his 1919 epoch-making poem, �The Second Coming� shows us a vision of full of apocalyptic, ritualistic and mystical symbolism. Drawing on the image of a falcon that has flown too far and on the notion of a catastrophic flood, the speaker sums up the spirit of his age, which is characterized by anarchy, violence, and the inversion of values. �The Second Coming", in its entirety, is an astounding encapsulation of Yeats' idea of the gyre and his fears about the future of mankind; it is expertly woven with threads of prophetic literary reference and impressive poetic techniques. The speaker of this poem is someone capable of seeing beyond the things. He is a poet-prophet of sorts. Yeats uses a bunch of metaphors and to evaluate the present state of affairs. The first stanza is a powerful description of apocalypse, opening with the indelible image of the falcon circling ever higher, in ever-widening spirals, so far that soon it i...