The Roots' platinum album Things Fall Apart (1999).Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart (1958).Schlesinger Jr.'s political manifesto The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, a defense of political centrism opens with citing the Yeats poem. Examples of works which reference 'The Second Coming' (titles, quotes, etc) include: Phrases and lines from the poem are used in many works, in a variety of media, such as literature, motion pictures, television, and music. Yeats wrote the poem while his wife was convalescing. The highest death rates of the pandemic were among pregnant women, who in some areas had a death rate of up to 70%. In the weeks preceding Yeats's writing of the poem, his pregnant wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, caught the virus and was very close to death, but she survived. The poem is also connected to the 1918–1919 flu pandemic. Yeats used the phrase 'the second birth' instead of 'the Second Coming' in his first drafts. The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence in January 1919, which followed the Easter Rising in April 1916, and before the British government had decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland. It is considered a major work of modernist poetry and has been reprinted in several collections, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming to allegorically describe the atmosphere of post-war Europe. Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920 and included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer. ' The Second Coming' is a poem that was written by Irish poet W. Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,Īnd what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desertĪ shape with lion body and the head of a man, The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out The best lack all conviction, while the worst The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere Things fall apart the centre cannot hold

Slouching towards bethlehem