How Yeats" The Second Coming is related to Achebe's Things Fall Apart.
William Butler Yeats wrote his "The Second Coming" in January of 1919, three years after the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and after the First World War had ravaged Europe from 1914 until 1918. Chinua Achebe wrote "Things Fall Apart", his first novel, in 1958, just two years prior to the establishment of an independent Nigerian state. These two seemingly unrelated pieces of literature are actually more related to each other than just the title.
All of the horrors that occurred during the First World War and conflicts between the Irish and English can explain the intricate and chaotically dark imagery of "The Second Coming". The poem contains "the recurring theory of history. The theory is one of the main themes within "The Second Coming." The "widening gyre," which appears in the first line of "The Second Coming," is the path along which the rest of the poem's imagery and action is set.
Europe was reeling from the physical and financial effects of the war. From Russia Bolshevism cast its shadow over the old patterns of work. War had broken out .Ireland was on the brink of rebellion, and within Irish society the Protestant Ascendancy had lost its grip. .
"The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold," wrote Yeats in the second and third line of "The Second Coming." Those lines are directly followed by a much less subtle way of expressing the idea of chaos; "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," says the fourth line. The imagery within lines two through four are associated with events such as the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914 by Gavrillo Princip, an anarchist, which caused the outbreak of World War I, the uprisings in colonial holdings such as India, Ireland, and many small rebellious outbreaks in African colonial holdings. The events associate themselves with "The Second Coming" because they show an outbreak of anarchy, and a loss of control.
