Thoughts today on W.B. Yeats’ classic poem “The Second Coming,” written in 1919 following World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, which I consider an actual pandemic, unlike Covid-19, which I consider to have been an epidemic that is mistakenly called a pandemic. The poem uses Christian imagery of the apocalypse to describe post-war conditions. Things had fallen apart, to paraphrase the poem, as a result of the war which is summed up as the end of empires, and peoples’ lives were falling apart from the flu as well. Yeats often ended his poems with questions. The question at the end of this one sometimes is interpreted as expectation of an antichrist. It might be said the poet was forecasting a Hitler-like leader in the near future. Here it is:
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?