Nick Tabor's Analysis of Yeat's "The Second Coming"

Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming” is a metaphor made up of metaphors.  Nick Tabor in his article “No Slouch” in The Paris Review brilliantly analyzes the poem and documents the “widening gyre of heavy-handed allusions” to this poem.  He enumerates over 36 citations from political commentary to comic books to Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart.  He argues that “…Yeats’s lines work outside their context because the word pairings are brilliant in and of themselves.” 

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/04/07/no-slouch/ 

Yeats "The Second Coming" Read by Tom O'Bedlam

Tom O'Bedlam reads WB Yeats "The Second Coming."  This poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War.  As an Irish poet, Yeats wrote this poem at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence from Great Britain.