Rhetorical Analysis Of The Second Coming

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William Butler Yeats was a poet, whom was born on june 13, 1865. He viewed society was doomed for a downfall after WWI. In, “The Second Coming,” William Butler Yeats portrays the second coming as a time where society is bound for destruction using diction, tone, and allusion. The author emphasizes the tone with the use of the words ‘rough beasts’ and ‘anarchy’. When the author says, “mere anarchy was loosed upon the world,” he was describing the serious decline of the society. This makes the tone very callous . The author acknowledges the sphinx to symbolize jesus or the person of the second coming. A sphinx would be described as, “ a shape with a lion body and the head of a man”. The sphinx is a godly creature, so for it to be used to symbolize