Whenever a catastrophe strikes, it's incredibly common to see an outburst of apocalyptic mania. One of the most enduring and popular artifacts of such an outburst is "The Second Coming", a poem written in the early 20's by Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The inspiring catastrophe in question was, of course, World War I, which had recently ended; but Yeats was also influenced by the failed Easter Rising of 1916, when Irish Nationalists tried to obtain independence from Great Britain. In fact, Yeats wrote a poem, "Easter, 1916", commemorating the fallen heroes, many of them personal friends, just a few months afterwards. But "The Second Coming" elevates Yeats' sense of disillusion into a cosmic existentialism foretelling the very end of the world.
The poem is divided into three sections, although many publications divide it into two stanzas. In the first section, Yeats describes the intellectual and cultural atmosphere in Europe after the War, with a 'falcon', symbolizing mankind's animalistic aggression, escaping from the control of its 'falconer', the social codes of civilization that had recently been blown apart. Without these codes, 'things fall apart', causing 'mere anarchy' and 'the blood-dimmed tide' to become 'loosed' upon the world (in this context, 'mere' means 'total'). That these disasters are 'loosed' implies that they were always somewhere within us, but had previously been held in check. 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity'- disillusioned by catastrophe, idealists completely give up, leaving a vacuum for more aggressive and violent people to take over. In less than fifteen years after the poem was published, the Nazi party would take over Germany.
At this point, the poem shifts to describe a troubling vision of 'the second coming'- a terrible creature, 'with lion body and the head of a man', makes its way across 'sands of the desert'. The desert locale and the sphinx-like nature of the creature evoke the ancient Near East, particularly Egypt, the origin of human civilization. Humanity has gone full circle and returned to its roots, where it will either recharge itself, or die off entirely. The speaker claims that this vision came from 'Spiritus Mundi'- a Latin phrase meaning 'the spirit of the world', a sort of archetypal storehouse (Yeats and Jung were contemporaries, and shared an interest in the occult). This places the vision in a realm beyond that of the speaker's own mind, making it impossible to dismiss the poem as little more than a troubled individual's neurotic reaction- it is a cosmological drama threatening all of creation.
We now enter the third and final section, where the speaker reflects on what he has just seen. He comes to the conclusion that the beast he saw was 'vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle' that interrupted its 'twenty centuries of stony sleep'. The 'rocking cradle' belongs to Christ, born in the same Middle-Eastern area as the beast of the vision. His birth was supposed to herald a paradisal era of perfect peace and happiness, but instead, it has resulted only in war and destruction. Now, with the failure of Christ's mission evident and absolute, the 'rough beast' of Revelations 'slouches towards Bethlehem to be born', where it will incarnate all of humanity's instinctual violence before bringing about its final end, without the trick ending of salvation.
