A Sign of the Second Coming -- Yeats

Know the Beauty of tomorrow began in the past-- And it must last through today, Suffering the indignities at hand. And then you can see out of Spiritus Mundi A shape with lion body and the head of a man, looking out with gaze blank and pitiless-- The Nightmare that slouches towards Bethlehem to be born... And Terra says he is coming A Sign of the Second Coming-- Yeats 6/9/'14 Yeats's poem the "Second Coming" was about WWI and how it was the war to end all wars, only now we know better. Really WWI signaled an end of fighting of one era to the beginning of another, and this horrified Yeats as the latter was so very bloody. Frightened him in a way that he wondered if man had not lost sense of himself, and I try to extend Yeat's vision of a spiritual nightmare into an environmental expression-- especially in the last line.