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” is a poem written by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920 and included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer.

He saw the age of classical antiquity as beginning with the Trojan War and then that thousand year cycle was overtaken by the Christian era, which is coming to a close.

In the weeks preceding Yeats′s writing of the poem, his pregnant wife, Georgie, caught the virus and was very close to death, but she survived.

[8][9] Critics have also argued that "The Second Coming" describes what Yeats elsewhere called an "antithetical dispensation" to the age ushered in by the birth of Jesus Christ.

[12] Richard Ellmann understood the "rough beast" of the final lines as a creature to be born itself in Bethlehem, marking the cyclical (and violent) overturning of an age.

[13] Giorgio Melchiori identified this same idea in Yeats' other writings, noting that "(1) by 1896 Yeats had already some inkling of the cyclical theory of history which he was later to develop and expound in A Vision; (2) The Trojan war, the birth of Christ, and an indefinite event due to happen in our century were already considered by him as three fundamental crises in world history, each of which reverse the established order and ushered in a new cycle of civilization .