W.B. Yeats

In a little over a week, decisions will be made about what direction we, as a people, will take towards a better future. We are at a crossroads, or using that much-overworked phrase, an inflection point. What path will we take?

Here’s a poem, "The Second Coming", written by Irish poet W.B. Yeats (June 13, 1865 – January 28, 1939) that fits the mood of our times. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to allegorically describe the atmosphere of post-war Europe.

Considered to be a major work of modernist poetry, the poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence in January 1919.

The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic. In the weeks preceding Yeats's writing of the poem, his pregnant wife Georgie Hyde-Lees caught the virus and was very close to death. While his wife was convalescing, he wrote "The Second Coming".

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of i{Spiritus Mundi}
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
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
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

--W.B. Yeats