Which Yeats poem reflects his belief that times were the anarchic end of the Christian cycle/gyre?

Which Yeats poem reflects his belief that times were the anarchic end of the Christian cycle/gyre?

• A. The Second Coming
• B. Easter 1916
• C. The Lake Isle of Innisfree
• D. Leda and the Swan

Answer: (A)

The idea being tested is Yeats’s belief that history moves in large cycles called gyres, and the end of the Christian-era cycle brings chaos and a sense that a new era is being born. The Second Coming embodies that view: things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, so anarchy is loosed upon the world. The image of a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born signals the birth of a new age, not the return of Christ, but the arrival of a different order after the old Christian-centered cycle has collapsed. The other poems don’t frame history in that cyclical, apocalyptic way—one speaks to political rebellion and sacrifice, another to a longing for a peaceful place, and another to mythic transformation—so they don’t express Yeats’s gyre-based sense of the end of an era.

The idea being tested is Yeats’s belief that history moves in large cycles called gyres, and the end of the Christian-era cycle brings chaos and a sense that a new era is being born. The Second Coming embodies that view: things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, so anarchy is loosed upon the world. The image of a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born signals the birth of a new age, not the return of Christ, but the arrival of a different order after the old Christian-centered cycle has collapsed. The other poems don’t frame history in that cyclical, apocalyptic way—one speaks to political rebellion and sacrifice, another to a longing for a peaceful place, and another to mythic transformation—so they don’t express Yeats’s gyre-based sense of the end of an era.