4. Writing in January 1919, as the wreckage of the Great War still smoldered, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats saw that the worst was yet to come:

 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.

After a few more lines, the poem concludes:

 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?

What Yeats saw as falling apart was European civilization, its apogee not much more than a tumbled memory as the twentieth century began. The “rough beast...slouching towards Bethlehem” that inspired his dread was very rough indeed: the horrors of the next decades were by any measure the bloodiest, most destructive, and most shameful in history.

The poem is entitled “The Second Coming.” It may be found in many collections. I have used Oscar Williams (ed.), The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the 20th Century (New York: The John Day Company, 1945), p. 300.

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) – “The Last Romantic” – was deeply conservative, leaning to the political Right. For many poets with significantly different values who have been inspirational for the Left, however – W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and C. Day Lewis in Britain, E.E. Cummings and Robinson Jeffers in the United States, for example – Yeats was an abiding and positive influence. (T.S. Eliot, similarly influential in poetry was, if anything, more conservative than Yeats, characterizing himself as a monarchist and as, in effect, a medieval Catholic.) See the fine study by Douglas Archibald, Yeats (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1983), especially Chapter 5, “Politics and Public Life, 1913-1939.” I note all this because in these days it seems to have been forgotten that one can learn much from those with whom one disagrees greatly.