A Disturbing Sight

"Says it feels right this time,
Turn around and found the light lime...
Then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel
was just a freight train coming your way."
-Metallica, No Leaf Clover

It's good to be back on the Honors Blog, ain't it? Let's see what I've got to work with here...ooh, Yeats! I've heard good things about this guy. Let's see, The Second Coming, hm, sounds vaguely Christian. (Reads)...what is this I don't even...???? I don't need to drive this train of thought any longer, we all know how divisive this poem was and how we couldn't fully determine the meaning of this poem. Still, there is a certain theme I want to touch on that this poem brings on more than any other I've read-what if we want to come is actually not what we get at all?
It's happened to us all. You take a difficult test that we think deserves an A, but you end up with a C. You get tickets to see someone perfom live hoping for an amazing show, but for one reason another it totally sucks. Now take that and enlarge it over 9000 times...this is Yeat's reality.

Consider that Yeats was an Irishman writing during a time of intense holy war between the Catholics and Protestants, where he not only knew of the scriptures and our perception of the apocalypse but also saw religion in its most evil form. Consider that this poem was written right after World War I, in a time where people had been eagerly expecting the return of Jesus Christ. For some, the most terrifying war of all time surely meant that Jesus would be coming soon and end the madness. For the secular, this was surely the war to end all wars and utopia would surely be established. Others merely saw a return to peace and hoped for better days after the hell they just went through. Yeats didn't share their sentiments. Regardless of all the symbolism and allusions that may or may not be in this poem, one thing is certain...things are about to get very bad very soon. It is not a second coming of Christ, but a second coming of war! We are not heading upwards towards Utopia but downwards into something far more terrifying than we can imagine.

Now consider the global depression that the world fell into after the war, the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and, most notable considering the Sphynx allusion, the Six Day War on the newly reformed nation of Israel of which Egypt participated in and tell Yeats he's wrong. Yeah, poets are like that, which is why I say that the light at the end of the tunnel most Europeans were expecting turned out to be a freight train, "surely the Second Coming is at hand."

Anyway, that's just some food for thought, thanks for reading. Please feel free to comment as you please, I commented on Joshua's The Slouching World.