Source: Roger James Hamilton

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?
 

* The Second Coming, William Butler Yeats
 

Irish poet, W.B. Yeats first published this - one of his most famous poems - exactly 100 years ago, in 1920.
 

At the time, his wife was pregnant and had the Spanish Flu (in which pregnant women had the highest mortality rate at 70%).
 

It was after the Easter Rising, in which a civilian uprising in Ireland triggered martial law and the execution of the leaders by the British Army. And it was before the Irish War of Independence began, marked by Bloody Sunday on 21st November 1920. On that day, the death of 13 British soldiers led to the British mass shooting of Irish fans at a Croke Park football match.
 

The turmoil at the time was summed up in Yeats’ poem. A hundred years of social injustice reached a tipping point, where the old was collapsing but what was to come was still unknown.
 

Thinking of his yet to be born child, Yeats first called the poem “The Second Birth”.
 

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
 

Would a new saviour of the times be born? Or an unknown beast even worse than the past?
 

After his poem, the world moved towards Yeats’ prophetic words: “A terrible beauty is born.”
 

The Spanish Flu ended and his wife and baby survived. But Ireland was divided into North and South and the violence continued. The Great Depression and World War II followed, creating far more destruction than what had come before.
 

A hundred years later, we’re at a similar tipping point. And we’re facing the same choice: A terrible beauty or a new renaissance.
 

This time, the choice is up to us.