Yeats concludes his poem with a creature that’s actively arriving — a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem, muscular and unavoidable. In contrast, Eliot finishes with people who struggle to complete a sentence, fading away into "a whimper." One apocalypse is loud, mythic, and approaching from the desert, while the other is already present, stifled within hollow skulls. Readers eager to grasp how modernist poetry grappled with catastrophe often return to these two poems because they tackle the same question — what does the end look like? — with entirely opposing images.
These two poems represent the definitive modernist divide on apocalypse: Yeats portrays it as a spectacle coming from outside, while Eliot depicts it as a vacancy decaying from within.
The Reader's Atlas · Compare · Modernist Apocalypses
The Hollow MenThe Second Coming
Put "The Hollow Men" (1925) by T. S.
Poets
T. S. Eliot / W. B. Yeats
Years
1925 / 1920
Chapter
Modernist Apocalypses
§01 The thesis
The Hollow Men & The Second Coming
A reader's case for putting these two side by side — what each carries, and what they argue when they sit on the same page.
§02 The dialectic axes
The two poems on four axes
Each axis isolates one specific vector — speaker, form, image, closing move — and reads the two poems against each other on that single dimension.
Axis
Poem A
The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot
Poem B
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats
01Speaker
Poem A · The Hollow Men
Eliot's speaker is plural and self-involved — the poem begins with "We are the hollow men," intertwining the speaker with the emptiness being depicted. There’s no perspective outside the devastation; the speaker is included in it.
Poem B · The Second Coming
Yeats's speaker is a unique seer, distanced from the chaos just long enough to receive a vision from *Spiritus Mundi*, the world's collective memory. He feels horror, yet he can see — and this ability to see distinguishes him from the hollow men who cannot.
02Form
Poem A · The Hollow Men
"The Hollow Men" has a fragmented structure — it consists of five sections that vary in length, features broken lines, and includes repeated phrases that circle back on themselves. The final section even sees a nursery rhyme fall apart in the middle of a verse. This form reflects the challenge of finishing a thought.
Poem B · The Second Coming
"The Second Coming" consists of two compact stanzas written in loose iambic pentameter, maintaining a steady momentum. The structure remains intact despite the content depicting a world in disarray, and this contrast between the poem's stable form and its catastrophic imagery creates a gripping tension that fuels its power.
03Central Image
Poem A · The Hollow Men
The central image in Eliot's poem represents absence in a tangible way: stuffed men, hollow heads, and dried voices. The setting is a barren land of dead cacti, a valley filled with fading stars. The imagery evokes a sense of things that ought to be alive but aren't — mere husks, not monsters.
Poem B · The Second Coming
Yeats culminates in a striking image: "A shape with lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun." This is the Sphinx brought to life, a mythological being stepping into the modern world. The image is vivid, unique, and unforgettable.
04Closing Move
Poem A · The Hollow Men
Eliot's poem concludes by fading away — the last lines echo and falter before settling on "not with a bang but a whimper." It feels like a letdown, a quiet descent. The world doesn’t meet a dramatic end; it simply loses its breath.
Poem B · The Second Coming
Yeats concludes with a haunting question — "what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" — which serves as a rhetorical gateway into a sense of dread. The beast is already on the move. Instead of fading away, the ending builds momentum.
§03 Synthesis & departure
The shared ground and the divergence
Shared
Both poems were crafted by prominent English-language poets within five years after World War One, and both reflect the psychological scars of that conflict without explicitly naming it. Each poem employs religious imagery to convey a sense of decline: Eliot's hollow men linger in the shadows of a faith that has failed them, unable to pray; Yeats references the birth of Christ as the turning point of a 2,000-year cycle that is now coming to an end. They both utilize desert imagery—Eliot's "cactus land" and "dead star," alongside Yeats's "waste of desert sand"—to depict a world stripped of vitality and meaning. Moreover, both poems offer no comfort. There’s no redemption, no hopeful voice, and no shift toward light. The tone in each poem is one of still-held dread. Additionally, both have produced lines so memorable they've transcended their original context: Eliot's "not with a bang but a whimper" and Yeats's "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" have made their way into political speeches, newspaper headlines, and novels, serving as shorthand for cultural disintegration.
Where they diverge
The sharpest difference is energy. Yeats's "The Second Coming" is full of movement. The gyre widens, the falcon speeds away from the falconer, the beast moves its slow thighs — everything is dynamic, building toward an arrival. The poem ends with a question mark, but it’s clearly rhetorical: the beast is coming, no doubt about it. Yeats's speaker is a witness with insight, someone given a terrifying glimpse through the collective unconscious he refers to as *Spiritus Mundi*.
In contrast, Eliot's hollow men lack both vision and energy. They are characterized by paralysis — unable to act, unable to speak clearly, unable even to finish the Lord's Prayer. The poem's well-known closing section breaks the children's rhyme "Here we go round the mulberry bush" into something fragmented and circular, going nowhere. While Yeats presents us with a single powerful image — the sphinx-like beast — Eliot offers fragmentation, repetition, and silence. Yeats's apocalypse represents an external force. Eliot's reflects the absence of any force at all.
§04 A reader's order of operations
Which to read first
If you've read "The Second Coming" and want to explore further, "The Hollow Men" is the perfect follow-up. It takes Yeats's external disaster and brings it into the depths of the human mind. While Yeats presents a beast to be afraid of, Eliot evokes the fear that there’s nothing left inside you to experience that fear. The emotional tone is more subdued and unsettling, and the fragmented style requires some patience. But if Yeats's poem had you contemplating the collapse of civilization, Eliot's will immerse you in the feelings of that collapse from within.
If you’ve only encountered Eliot, reading Yeats will feel like a jolt of clarity cutting through the haze—one striking image instead of a collection of fragments.
§05 Reader's questions
On The Hollow Men vs The Second Coming, frequently asked
Answer
Yes, they’re among the most frequently paired works in modernist poetry classes. Both tackle the disillusionment following World War I, they’re concise enough to fit into a single class session, and the difference between Yeats’s mythic energy and Eliot’s spiritual paralysis sparks engaging discussions.
Answer
"The Second Coming" was published first by Yeats in 1920, followed by Eliot's "The Hollow Men" in 1925. It's highly likely that Eliot was aware of Yeats's poem while crafting his own.
Answer
From Eliot: "This is how the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." From Yeats: "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold" — although "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" is a close contender and has gained significant traction in political discussions.
Answer
Yeats employs the Christian idea of the Second Coming — the return of Christ — to create structural irony. Rather than Christ appearing, a monstrous beast resembling a sphinx comes forth. Yeats thought that history progressed in 2,000-year cycles, which he referred to as gyres, and the poem illustrates the violent shift from one cycle to another.
Answer
They are spiritually empty modern individuals — too benign to be genuinely damned, yet not vibrant enough to be saved. Eliot referenced Dante's figures who never chose between good and evil, as well as the stuffed Guy Fawkes effigies burned in English bonfire traditions. They symbolize a form of living death, stuck between taking action and remaining inactive.
Answer
Yes, although neither directly names the war. Yeats composed "The Second Coming" in January 1919, shortly after the Armistice, during a time of the Russian Revolution and political unrest in Ireland. Eliot's poem reflects this cultural fatigue, shaped by his own religious struggles and the spiritual emptiness he had previously examined in "The Waste Land" (1922).
Answer
Not literally, no. Eliot is talking about a spiritual and psychological decline — the breakdown of meaning, faith, and will — rather than a physical apocalypse. This line serves as a diagnosis of modern consciousness, not a forecast for the planet.
§06 More from this chapter
The center cannot hold
10 comparisons in this chapter
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