Summary

The poem opens with the image of the “widening” gyre “turning and turning” (1). Caught in the centripetal force of the gyre, a falcon loses its way and “cannot hear the falconer” (2). Yeats then descends the reader into total chaos as “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” (3). As “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” values are turned upside down, what was once considered good is now considered bad, and violence lingers on every horizon (3).

As if trying to convince himself, the speaker repeats, “Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand” (9-10). Instead of the Second Coming, the “Spiritus Mundi” appears: the spirit of the world (12). It emerges from the “sands of the desert” as a lion with the head of a man (13). Rather than helping the speaker, the lion-man looks on with a “gaze blank and pitiless...