What does the ceremony of innocence suggest in The Second Coming?

Answer 1

Yeats wrote The Second Coming in 1919.

Betwen 1815 (the end of the Napoleonic Wars) and 1914 (WWI) Europe had enjoyed almost a century without major conflict: this was an exceptionally long period of peace by European standards.

Then in 1914 the World War, the Irish Easter Rising (of special interest to Yeats), the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Spartacist (Communist) movement in Germany (and soon after the rise of Fascism in both Germany and Italy) - all followed each other rapidly.

Yeats had grown up in a war-free Europe - suddenly everybody was fighting.

There was also the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1916-20 - which killed more people than WWI had done.

As Yeats says: 'things fall apart'.

The Ceremony of Innocence would refer to how things were before the chaos started around 1912 (there were several years of turbulence before WWI broke out). The period 1890 - 1910 is often called La Belle Epoque (the Beautiful Time): people had got used to the idea of peace, and the Industrial Revolution was just starting to result in prosperity even for ordinary people (some of them). Yeats is thinking back to those beautiful times of his childhood, and how they are now gone forever.

(Yeats would revisit this theme in Leda and the Swan, a few years later).

Answer 2

The "ceremony of innocence" in "The Second Coming" suggests a loss of purity and naivety in the face of chaos and darkness. It conveys the idea that innocence is being corrupted or destroyed by the turbulent events described in the poem.