W.B. Yeats--The Second Coming

The Easter 1916 uprising failed, a huge effort for Irish separatism. Yeats knew all of its leaders and was in love with one of them. Domestic political revolution all over Europe was channelled into the "Great War", World War I. Most of the artists and many of the writers during that time, involved in anarchist, expressionist, futurist or other burgeoning art movements were either killed in Europe--or--went a little crazy afterward.

You can extrapolate to other fields and start counting the loss.

After the First World War,  ten years ensued where people tried to forget the past. I think that many believed that there was no future, or were completely disenchanted by what society seemed to provide.

So Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" in 1919 or 1920, after years of disappointment at home and abroad. In this lead-up, I have given my personal beliefs about the antecedents of this poem. A world gone mad, and nobody paying attention.

The first stanza especially speaks to me.  But I should let Yeats do the talking:

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 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: a waste of desert sand;
    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
    Wind 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