The underlying metric pattern of “The Second Coming” is iambic pentameter, that mainstay of English poetry from Shakespeare onward, in which each line is made up of five iambic feet, da DUM / da DUM / da DUM / da DUM / da DUM. But this fundamental meter is not immediately evident in Yeats’ poem, because the first line of each section (one hesitates to call them stanzas, because there are only two and they are nowhere near the same length or pattern) begins with an emphatic trochee and then moves into a very irregular, but nonetheless incantatory rhythm of mostly iambs:
TURN ing / and TURN / ing in / the WIDE / ning GYRE
. . . . .
SURE ly / some RE / ve LA / tion IS / at HAND
The poem is sprinkled with variant feet, many of them like the third foot in the first line above, pyrrhic (or unstressed) feet, which enhance and emphasize the stresses that follow them. And the last line repeats the strange pattern of the first lines of the section, beginning with a bang, the trochee, followed by the tripping of unstressed syllables as the second foot is turned around into an iamb:
SLOU ches / toward BETH / le HEM / to be / BORN
There are no end-rhymes, not many rhymes at all, in fact, though there are many echoes and repetitions:
Turning and turning...
The falcon... the falconer
Surely... at hand
Surely the Second Coming... at hand
The Second Coming!
Altogether the effect of all this irregularity of form and emphasis combined with the incantatory repetitions creates the impression that “The Second Coming” is not so much a made thing, a written poem, as it is a recorded hallucination, a dream captured.