The Second Coming (William Butler Yeats)

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?

I cannot agree with the last two lines. The beast is not the angel with the sharp sickle. But fear of that angel is natural, when one is abandoning the divine, cf. Mensch ohne Welt. Apart from that the poem is good, as far as the content is concerned, and the first two lines I've boldened come quite close to two recent observations of mine (Schattengläubige, Es bleibt nur das Gesetz):

The believers ask not what they seek and the mundane
Have lost all guidance they could hold on to.

Not quite the same, yet in a similar vain: Yeats describes the birth of unreason, cf. Die wahre Bedeutung des I Chings, and I describe its death.

When Yeats wrote: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. he meant Christianity. When he is quoted these days, the United Nations are meant.

That which replaced Jesus Christ as the highest standard is the Antichrist, whom the beast will topple after having grudgingly upheld him for a century.

Some orthodoxy seems in order. It is not Bethlehem, where the beast was born, but on the battlefields of World War I. Yeats didn't immediately recognise it. And I wonder whether those who were behind what happened on September 13th, 1913 and December 23rd, 1913, knew what they were about to give birth to. It was the highest earthly falconer who was the father of the transformation of the falcon into the beast, whether he knew what he was doing or otherwise.