"The Second Coming" (pp. 1109-10), by W. B. Yeats is a very good poem in which Yeats explains his position that events in time move in two thousand year cycles. He compares the movement of time to a gyre (1) or funnel that gets wider, or narrower, as you move from one end to another. In "The Second Coming", Yeats tells us that a widening cycle that began with the birth of Jesus continued for twenty centuries (19). Yeats says that "some revelation is at hand; . . . Second Coming is at hand (10-11)," to tell the reader that the twentieth century marked the beginning of the new, narrowing cycle in which much of the progress of the previous cycle becomes unraveled and deteriorates into anarchy (4).
             He uses the Sphinx, which has a lion's body and a human's head (14), to symbolize the coming of something. Yeats views this second coming as something negative. This shows in his use of the phrases: "darkness drops again (18)" and "vexed to nightmare (20)." It also shows in use of the word "Bethlehem" in the phrase "slouching toward Bethlehem (22)." Here, "Bethlehem" does not refer to the actual city in present-day Israel, which is the site of much unrest and the birthplace of Jesus. Yeats uses "Bethlehem" in a figurative sense to mean that something is about to be born; it can also be a reference to "bedlam" or anarchy, as mentioned in line 4.
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