Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart Study
Guide

Read the following poem, which is the source of the title of Achebe`s
novel:William Butler Yeats: "The Second Coming"
(1921)Yeats was attracted to the spiritual and occult world and
fashioned for himself an elaborate mythology to explain human experience. "The
Second Coming," written after the catastrophe of World War I and with communism
and fascism rising, is a compelling glimpse of an inhuman world about to be
born. Yeats believed that history in part moved in two thousand-year cycles. The
Christian era, which followed that of the ancient world, was about to give way
to an ominous period represented by the rough, pitiless beast in the poem.
Turning and turning in the widening
gyre (1) The falcon cannot
hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;Mere anarchy
is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all
conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.Surely
some revelation is at hand;Surely the
Second Coming (2) is at hand;The Second Coming! Hardly
are those words outWhen a vast image out of
Spiritus Mundi (3)Troubles my sight: somewhere in
sands of the desertA shape with lion body and the head of a man,A gaze
blank and pitiless as the sun,Is moving its slow thighs, while all about
itReel shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again;
but now I knowThat twenty centuries (4) of stony
sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,And what rough beast,
its hour come round at lastSlouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Notes: