A Response to Yeat's Apocolypse

The Yeat's The Second Coming that Cas has posted fits nicely into many of the previous posts regarding the degradation, of what we maintain as humanity, in the years following The Great War and leading into WWII. Many of us still have issues understanding just how severe the circumstances were at the time, but here Yeats at least shows us that he truly thought the times were extradordinary. Lines such as: "now I know that twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle" show just how bad things were, or at least appeared to be. Even today, it's hard to compare WWI to WWII as the latter had a distinct purpose and there was an easily discerned moral difference, while the years-long massacre that was the Great War was fought for nearly no reason and thus created even more worry and doubt in the human race from many, many persons.

The comparison of the times by Yeats is not simply to the falling of a a government or of a nation (his being England), but of the entire world. According to Yeats, humanity as a whole has lost it's focus after this traumatic period; its good are nowhere to be found, while its bad are the ones rising up (ie. Hitler, Stalin(?)). Despite all this, "The Second Coming" generally refers to Christ's Second Coming (or Satan's falsification of The Second Coming). Perhaps Yeats meant this to be Satan's testing, and perhaps this poem isn't as apocopytic as it seems at first, for if bound to the common definition of the title, the "savior," if you will, is still coming.