Well....Here Goes The Plunge

Well I actually really liked Yeats' poem, The Second Coming. The part that really stood out to me was the Beast.
"When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds."

As soon as I read this, I stopped and looked up the name of whatever had the body of a lion and the head of a man. It pulled up the Sphynx. There are many different versions of the Sphynx in literature. In Greek mythology, the Sphynx guards the city of Thebes and people must answer a riddle in order to gain access into the city. If they answer incorrectly then the Sphynx eats them. Oedipus was the only man to ever solve the riddle. I did not think that this was the Sphynx that Yeats was referring to. I felt that he was talking about the Egyptian Sphynx. Especially since he was mentioning the sand in the line before. In Egypt, the Sphynx was built to represent the closeness of the pharoahs with their sun god. They were also guardians. Yeats seems to tie them together even more when he mentions how the Beast has a gaze that is pitiless like the sun. The only way I can link the Egypt idea with religion is the story of when Moses had to get his people out of slavery in Egypt from the Pharoah. I don't think I really know what I'm talking about honestly, but I feel like maybe Yeats is very fearful of the idea of a giant monster coming and killing everyone. But it feels very odd yet significant that the Beast is coming from Egypt.

P.S. I commented on Anna's, "An Unravelling and a Revelation."