William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939, was a poet originally from Ireland. Throughout his life he was fascinated in mysterious things such as mediums, supernatural systems, reincarnation, communication with the dead, and oriental mysticism. Daemon est Deus Inversus was the magical name of the Dublin Lodge of the Hermetic Society, a group which he formed in 1886.
In 1921 Yeats wrote a poem entitled "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 toward Bethlehem to be born?.
This poem was written at the closing of World War 1, when Europe and the rest of the world were recovering. The poem describes the rise of communism and fascism and the spread of great social troubles. He illustrates the world as spinning out of control, saying that technology, one of many things, is progressing beyond mankind's ability and they wont be able to control it. The title alone, depicts an apocalypse and the changing of the world.
The first four lines of this poem are found amidst the opening pages of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. I find there to be a lot of similarities between the novel and the poem.
