The Second Coming

The poem opens with the lines “Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer” with gyre meaning a spiraling vortex form. I believe this is to represent becoming so lost within chaos that one cannot hear themselves anymore.

“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosened upon the world” furthers the idea presented in the first two lines. The centre, which is typically the government, has fallen apart and thus chaos has consumed the world. In regard to Things Fall Apart, I believe Achebe chose this line to represent his novel because this is exactly what has happened. The centre, in this case the powerful leaders of the clan and their government, have fallen apart at the feet of white men, and chaos has ensued. The “blood-dimmed tide” represents the extreme amount of death loss that is occurring,

“drowning” the innocent in the waters of upheaval. In such a time of anarchy, people lose all inhibitions, which serves to only further the madness that is occurring. This is represented in the last two lines of the first stanza. “The best” representing those who would typically be controlling the situation with level heads, and “the worst” representing those who sparked the upheaval.

The second stanza opens with the idea of “the second coming” which would seem to represent the second coming of Christ. Spiritus Mundi is “the spirit of the world” and is found in the sands of desert, which represents the emptiness of the world due to death. The image of the sphinx presented with its “blank stare” among the “real shadows if indignant desert birds” can represent, in the case of Things Fall Apart, the presence of white missionaries among the natives. The end of the poem can be seen to represent the disrupted peace of the natives who lived and developed their culture for “twenty centuries” on their own only to be “rocked” by the nightmare of the white man.