Yeats's' Survival Plan

Since Dr. Cotton gave away about half the books in his office last week, I've been obsessed anew with the poetry of W. B. Yeats, and found a particular well-known selection to be quite fitting:



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?



This poem, apocalyptic in literal meaning, as well as that which can be derived from form and meter, takes on a spiritual (though questionably religiously sanctioned) tone, commenting on the people of the world and their desire to put the end in the hands of some form of Savior. Religion is one of the most powerful institutions in the world specifically because people are terrified of what will happen in "the end," right? Humans seem to tend towards wanting a sort of rule-book to the End of Days, or at least some small solace.
The poem displays the questions and contradictory thoughts related to the end of the world through its own questions and contrasts. The poem contains six semicolons, each representing contradiction, half of those contained to a mere two lines in the beginning of the poem. Evidently, any man who meditates on the end, on the "Things fall[ing] apart," of the world begins such thought with concrete examples of discord (the falcon/falconer reference) that lead to greater, more consuming realizations, like that of "The best [who] lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."
"Surely some revelation is at hand" is a line that, to me, rings especially true of the human condition. If things seem to be going downhill, of course there will be revelation, revolution, spiritual fulfillment, another life--whatever. We tend towards second chances, and, ultimately, towards renewal.
Think of each of the apocalyptic narratives we've read so far. From The Autobiography of J. G. B., to The Road, to Parable of the Sower, to Zeitoun, each story has ended on a note that bears hope in some form--whether it be for J.'s questionable "work," the Earthseed community, the boy's new family, or Zeitoun's relief from jail, Yeats comments on a very real psychological construct that humanity suffers--we can't imagine the end. We can't write narratives in which everything dies and then nothing comes next.
Yeats comments on that tendency in a rather terrifying way: though his ending definitely yields a "next," the turn of events is chilling. What if the "Savior" awaited at the end of the world isn't a life of "true work," a new community, or a release? What if it is a "rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born?"