The objective man on the other hand, whose gyre moves outward, receives at this moment the revelation, not of himself seen from within, for that is impossible to objective man, but of himself as if he were somebody else. The blood-dimmed tide of 'The Second Coming' has been released on the earth. The first stanza of “The Second Coming” is a powerful description of an apocalypse, opening with the indelible image of the falcon circling ever higher, in ever-widening spirals, so far that “The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” The centrifugal impetus described by those circles in the air tends to chaos and disintegration — “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold ” — and more than chaos and disintegration, to war — “The blood-dimmed tide” — to fundamental doubt — “The best lack all conviction” — and to the rule of misguided evil — "The worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”. They may even actually confuse the reading of a poem which is accessible without them. Throughout history, the interpretation of the gyres means that one dominant historical principle, the primary phase, is always shadowed by its antithesis, the objective by the subjective, and vice versa. By a kind of transference, the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles (who believed all things are a mingling of the four elements, held together by love or separated by strife, perpetually entering into new configurations) is held responsible for the present disorderliness in things. The second section of the poem offers a glimpse into the nature of that next, new world: It is a sphinx — “a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi... / A shape with lion body and the head of a man” — therefore it is not only a myth combining elements of our known world in new and unknown ways, but also a fundamental mystery, and fundamentally alien — “A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” It does not answer the questions posed by the outgoing domain — therefore the desert birds disturbed by its rising, representing the inhabitants of the existing world, the emblems of the old paradigm, are “indignant.” It poses its own new questions, and so Yeats must end his poem with the mystery, his question: “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”. Yeats alludes to the Christian belief in the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Any one moment thus contains two antithetical, interpenetrating movements, for one cone is widening as the other, whirling in the opposite direction, narrows. The rape of Leda by a god in the shape of a swan is thus reversed in the annunciation of the dove to Mary. This is the posture taken by the Hamlet and Lear of 'Lapis Lazuli', who embrace 'Tragedy wrought to its uttermost' with a 'Gaiety transfiguring all that dread'. At the present moment the life gyre is sweeping outward, unlike that before the birth of Christ which was narrowing, and has almost reached its greatest expansion. An amazing poem about the dangers currently facing modern man. The poem speaks of the disintegration of modern society with the spread of anarchy and the consequent violence and bloodshed.