Context

Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War and the influenza pandemic, and first published it in 1920; it later opened his 1921 collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Its imagery comes from the mystical system of his book A Vision, which pictured history as a succession of interlocking spirals, or gyres, each age widening until it loses coherence and gives way to its opposite. The opening lines watch a falcon spiral so far outward that it can no longer hear the falconer’s call to return.

How the repetition works

Diacope — broad-form epizeuxis with a short connective (here, “and” or “the”) between the repeated words. About this distinction →

Where the catalogue’s other diacope — “tomorrow, and tomorrow,” “curiouser and curiouser” — uses the intervening “and” to mark weary continuance or mounting wonder, Yeats makes the figure rotational: “Turning and turning” sets the line itself revolving, enacting the widening gyre before the poem names it. Poe’s bells peal and Kipling’s boots trudge — linear, percussive repetitions — whereas here the doubled verb spins outward, a spiral steadily losing the centre that the very next line warns “cannot hold.” It is the catalogue’s clearest case of epizeuxis used to render circular motion rather than emotional pitch.