This means that having a dream about the apocalypse is more reflective of the feelings that you haven’t been dealing with, subconscious symbolism that needs to be brought to the light, and how you feel about your waking life. Most dreams are more reflective of what’s going on on an internal level individually, rather than predicting the future. You don’t have to worry or freak out and tell your friends. However, if you’ve recently had a dream that you’re in the middle of the end of the world, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re having a prophetic dream about these unprecedented times that we’re in. If you take any time to tune into the news, you might swear that an apocalypse could be starting tomorrow! There are so many things that are up in the air when it comes to the state of the world. Yeats by George Charles Beresford, 1911 Wikimedia Commons.It’s no surprise to have dreams about the end of the world - we’re all facing pretty scary times, right? He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. We’ve offered some tips for writing a brilliant English Literature essay here. It also has a very helpful introduction and copious notes. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.įor more on Yeats, see our analysis of his popular poem ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’ and our commentary on ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. The best edition of Yeats’s essential poetry (and some of his prose and dramatic works) is The Major Works including poems, plays, and critical prose (Oxford World’s Classics). Yeats was in favour of Irish independence but, in poems such as ‘Easter 1916’ which respond to the Easter Rising, he reveals himself to be uneasy with the violent and drastic political and military methods adopted by many of his compatriots. She knew she could be of more use to him as a muse than as a wife or lover. Yeats asked her to marry him several times, but she always refused. Throughout much of his life, a woman named Maud Gonne was his muse. And yet, at the same time, there is a directness to his work which makes readers feel personally addressed, and situates his work always at one remove from more famous modernist poets (such as T. His late work, such as his 1927 poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, about growing old, show a thoughtful and contemplative poet whose imagery and references defy easy exegesis (what exactly does the ancient city of Byzantium represent in this poem?). As his career developed and literary innovations came with modernism in the early decades of the twentieth century, Yeats’s work retained its focus on traditional verse forms and rhyme schemes, but he became more political, more allusive, and more elliptical. His first collection, Crossways, appeared in 1889 when he was still in his mid-twenties, and his early poetry bore the clear influence of Romanticism.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is one of the greatest of all Irish poets. In short, it’s losing control, and ‘the centre cannot hold’. But the gyre is ‘widening’: it is getting further and further away from its centre, its point of origin. In the run-up to the millennium, the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Christ – traditionally, anyway – many people began to consider the possibility of this ‘Second Coming’ more.) The ‘gyre’ metaphor Yeats employs in the first line (denoting circular motion and repetition) is a nod to Yeats’s mystical belief that history repeats itself in cycles.
(Yeats wrote ‘The Second Coming’ in 1919, and it was published two years later in his volume Michael Robartes and the Dancer. The poem, in summary, prophesies that some sort of Second Coming (traditionally, this is the return of Christ to Earth, as was promised in the New Testament) is due, and that the anarchy that has arisen all around the world (partly because of the events of the First World War, though the tumultuous events in Yeats’s home country of Ireland are also behind the poem) is a sign that this Second Coming cannot be far off.
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