The Second Coming

We have been studying the book of Revelation in our Sunday School class. Consequently, I have been thinking about final things a lot recently. This weekend I stumbled across a Yeats poem that I found to be interesting and relevant.

In the aftermath of the first world war, Yeats saw an apocalyptic meaning behind the current times; he postulated that something very soon was coming that would supplant Christianity. Therefore he wrote "The Second Coming" which is (as best I can tell) a poem about the coming of the Antichrist. The poem is rich, drawing from many sources, but I was struck by the parallels with a modern day novel seemingly crafted after Yeats' work, Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men (which gets its title from another Yeats poem, "Sailing to Byzantium").

Anyway, here is the poem.


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 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?