202603271426 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?

Written by William Butler Yeats in 1919, laying out a portion of his cosmology, the poem describes the ending of an age in his pendulum of ages similar to 202206090853 Friedrich Nietzsche's blonde beasts and priestly castes in Nietzche's On the Geneology of Morals. Despite the similarities and the seeming reference to the second coming of Christ, this is not a reference to Christianity, more of a subversion of it. This aligns with the Yeats's belief that the age of Christian morality was coming to an end and that there would be a second coming of an age of Greco-Roman morality. It is emblematic of modernist poetry depicting post-war Europe of the 1920's.