"The Second Coming": A Vision in a Nightmare Quiz

Answer:

William Butler Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" in 1919, in the aftermath of World War One and during the Spanish flu pandemic that killed millions of people, and nearly cost the life of Georgie Hyde-Lees, the poet's pregnant wife. First published in November 1920 in the American magazine "The Dial", it was later included in the 1921 collection "Michael Robartes and the Dancer". Yeats would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature two years later.

"The Second Coming" is written in an approximation of iambic pentameter, with most lines between 9 and 11 syllables in length. It has no set rhyme scheme, relying instead on alliteration (as in "stony sleep" and "darkness drops") and the repetition of some key words ("loosed", "surely") for effect. Unlike other famous poems by Yeats, its language is relatively straightforward.

The poem describes the disintegration of post-WWI Europe in allegorical terms, drawing from Christian imagery, in particular from apocalyptic literature. The title refers to the return of Jesus Christ to Earth, which in many Christian denominations is identified with the Last Judgment (as mentioned in the Nicene Creed).

However, "The Second Coming" is also informed by Yeats' own unique view of history: the "gyre" mentioned in the first line is Yeats' term for one of a series of cycles that make up human history - a view influenced by Hinduism, as well as various mystical and occult theories. The widening gyre is the Christian era slowly but inexorably coming to an end, like a falcon that has escaped its falconer's control. In a grotesque reversal of Christian belief, the end of the era is marked by the birth of a "rough beast", a sphinx-like creature that represents chaos and violent upheaval - in fact, an Antichrist.

The breakdown of the social order described in the first stanza - with the particularly poignant contrast between the apathy of the "best" and the energized attitude of the "worst" - introduces the reader to the appearance of the monstrous creature, whose image originates from "Spiritus Mundi", a kind of collective unconscious. In Yeats' view, the civilization cultivated during the 2,000 years of the Christian era has been unable to vanquish humankind's worst inclinations, which are about to usher an age of chaos and darkness - what the Hindus call "Kali Yuga".

In the decades following its publication, this enormously influential poem has become the blueprint for depicting the kind of social and political turmoil that evokes fear of the outbreak of a third global conflict. Some of its lines have been used as titles for works in various media - most notably the 1958 novel "Things Fall Apart" by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, and the 1968 collection of essays "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" by American writer and journalist Joan Didion.

The title of this quiz is a homage to another great English-language poem, "Kubla Khan" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose subtitle is "A Vision in a Dream".