The speaker of “The Second Coming” is an unnamed first-person narrator who is observing the world around him and speculating on what’s to come; the perspective is often attributed to Yeats himself. The poem is in blank verse and consists of two stanzas and 22 lines, the second stanza being longer than the first. The meter loosely follows iambic pentameter, with alternating stressed and unstressed syllables and roughly 10 syllables per line.

In the first stanza Yeats uses imagery to set the stage. A falcon flying in a wider and wider circle with no direction from his master introduces a sense of aimlessness. Yeats builds this feeling with a diacope of the word “turning,” repeating it twice in the first line to create a dizzying effect. The falcon symbolizes the wayward nature of the speaker’s society: People have lost their direction and moral compass, and they no longer listen to their master, the falconer, who may be a metaphor for a moral authority. Additionally, these two lines contain a consonance of the heavy “n” sound in the words “turning,” “widening,” “falcon,” “cannot,” and “falconer” (Lines 1-2).