Yeats wrote his poem The Second Coming in the aftermath of World War I in 1919, but I think it has special resonance in the closing years of the Obama administration:
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 convictions, 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: 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?
The reference to his mystical occultic belief in ” Spiritus Mundi” does seem to make this a poem for these times. People debate about Islam and Christianity in this administration and in the world, but the new ageism of this last century has been a largely unrecognized part of the spiritual war.
Neo-neocon’s website just posted this poem a couple of days ago.
Yeats poem is about the coming of the anti-Christ. Who could be his John the Baptist?