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 the 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?
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Second Coming (1920), second verse.
A prophet to be heard today! 'Yeats famously regarded The Second Coming as a reflection on the disillusionment and decay following World War I and a forecast of even more significant upheaval. In a letter to a friend, he wrote that the poem sprang from his meditations on the cyclical nature of history and his belief in the breakdown of modern civilisation. Yeats’s prophetic tone and apocalyptic imagery cement The Second Coming as one of the most influential works in modernist poetry. Its publication during global instability—shortly after the Russian Revolution, the Irish War of Independence, and the Treaty of Versailles—solidifies its relevance to the poet’s contemporary context and broader human history.'
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