In A Vision Yeats combines Christianity with elements as disparate as theosophy, astrology, neoPlatonism, spiritualism, the magic and Cabbalistic traditions, the work of writers such as Swedenborg, Boehme and Blake. The end result, such as “Ego Dominus Tuus” and “The Second Coming”, is a unitary system in which Yeats defines his ideas on history, religion and art.
“The Second Coming” depicts an apocalyptic scene, and the advent of a “rough beast” oxymoronically slouching towards Bethlehem “to be born.” In accordance with Yeats’s view on cosmic and historical cycles, which will be touched upon in this essay, it is generally regarded as prophesizing the end of the “twenty centuries” of the Christian Era. It embodies or foreshadows the revelation of the character of the age to come, completely antithetical to that of the Christian Era, which, in Yeats’s mind, was nearing its conclusion. The poem’s title, its biblically allusive infrastructure, and its Latin evocation of a “Spiritus mundi” (namely, “soul of the world”) disclose its intention to cast an appeal on the “collective unconscious” of the entire Christian world
Such a coexistence of opposite forces would also conform perfectly with Yeats’s view of Unity of Being, which entails a detached and simultaneous outlook on both Good and Evil. Yeats seems to have accessed this “antithetical” state of consciousness in “The Second Coming”, where the triumphal Christian connotations evoked by the title are offset by the terrifying scenario in the poem, which describes what is in fact a reverse apocalypse and the coming of the Antichrist. On its most evident plane, Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is, obviously, the description of an apocalyptic (or anti-apocalyptic) scene.

• Kim, Jooseong(Dankook Univ.)