Brent & Argus

‘The Second Coming’ in a Godless Age

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William Butler Yeats’ 1919 poem The Second Coming is eerily prophetic.

Written in the wake of World War I, it captures a world spinning out of control, one where moral order collapses, and something dark slouches toward the future.

Over a hundred years later, the poem still resonates, possibly even more than Yeats could have imagined.

But what if Yeats was pointing to something even deeper than just historical cycles? What if The Second Coming is a poetic response to what Nietzsche famously declared: “God is dead”?

The death of God, as Nietzsche saw it, wasn’t a victory march for atheism. It was a terrifying realization that, without God, we’d scramble to create a new religion.

And here we are, living in the world that Yeats and Nietzsche warned about, where our replacement for God is a strange brew of hyper-individualism, colorless Scientism, and the empty mantra of “do what feels right.”

Maybe Yeats’ rough beast isn’t just a political or historical force. It’s the spiritual emptiness that comes when we trade truth for self-made morality.

Things Fall Apart

Yeats’ famous opening lines set the tone:

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 imagery of the “widening gyre” suggests history spiraling out of control.

Yeats, who was deeply influenced by mysticism, believed history moved in cycles with each age ending in chaos before giving way to something new.

The center isn’t holding.

People are more divided than ever. Ideology replaces reason. Truth is subjective.

The old moral order has been replaced by a DIY spirituality of self-fulfillment, where feelings trump reality and traditional wisdom is dismissed as outdated superstition. Chaos reigns.

Nietzsche warned that when we kill God, we don’t just remove a belief system. We remove the foundation for objective meaning.

In its place, we’ve set up the New Religion of modernity. Yeats saw the writing on the wall. When you cut off the falcon from the falconer, you don’t get freedom. You get disorder.

The Best Lack All Conviction

This line has always felt so intensely real, but never more so than today:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

In an era where moral courage seems so rare and unprincipled voices dominate every conversation, Yeats’ words cut deep.

Instead of wise leadership, we get empty rhetoric.

Instead of principled action, we get performative outrage.

Meanwhile, those with actual wisdom hesitate, cowed by the sheer volume of noise and the implicit threat of deviating from the New Religion.

This dynamic isn’t new, but the digital age has amplified it. The internet ensures the “worst” can be intensely passionate on a global scale, while the “best” often find themselves exhausted by the sheer insanity of it all.

Some Revelation is at Hand

Yeats’ vision of the future isn’t a hopeful one:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

A Christian hearing this might assume he’s referencing Christ’s return—but Yeats isn’t talking about Jesus.

Instead, he envisions something dark, a “rough beast” emerging as the new order of things. This isn’t the triumphant arrival of divine justice but the rise of something terrifying and alien.

History tells us that moral and societal collapse usually lead to something grim: the rise of totalitarian regimes, mass deception, and loss of personal freedoms.

Whether through surveillance capitalism, ideological extremism, or the erosion of common sense, the modern “rough beast” isn’t just coming—it’s already here.

Slouches Towards Bethlehem

The poem ends with the chilling image of this “rough beast” making its slow, inevitable way toward Bethlehem, signaling a new era in the Christian West.

If history moves in cycles, as Yeats believed, we’re in a turning point.

But while he saw chaos as inevitable, we’re not entirely powerless. The falcon can still hear the falconer—if it chooses to listen.

That means rejecting the shallow religion of “do what feels right” and having the courage to acknowledge that not all truth is relative.

Nietzsche lamented that when we abandoned God, we had nothing strong enough to replace Him.

Yeats saw the consequences of that unfolding.

We don’t have to blindly follow the rough beast wherever it leads. We can still choose truth over confusion, courage over apathy, and meaning over nihilism.

G.K. Chesterton once said, “The business of progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”

Maybe the business of the rest of us is to stop waiting for someone else to fix things and start rebuilding the true, the beautiful, and the just.

Final Thoughts

The Second Coming remains one of the most haunting poems of modern literature because it taps into a truth about human nature: when we abandon moral clarity, we invite chaos.

Yeats may have had an unsettling vision of the future, but he also left us with a warning.

The question is, will we listen? Or does the beast get its way?

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