What topic is in this poem and what features make this piece a modernist poetry?HELP ME!

Question

The Second Coming

What topic is in this poem and what features make this piece a modernist poetry?HELP ME!

THE SECOND COMING Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Asked by Al B #1178531 on 9/30/2021 9:50 PM

Last updated by Aslan on 10/1/2021 1:59 AM

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Answered by Aslan on 10/1/2021 1:59 AM

"The Second Coming" is a response to a world wracked by violence. Yeats wrote the poem 1919, right after the end of World War I, in which 16 million people were killed in a horrifying display of the power of modern technological warfare and of the continuing conflicts that wracked the supposedly modern, civilized world. The poem voices a sense of shock, dismay, and pessimism about the future that many felt after the war. Lines like "blood-dimmed tide" and "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" both eloquently describe the horrific chaos of war and violence.

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