The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Chaos and Disintegration
As Yeats noted in “The Second Coming,” things fall apart when the center cannot hold. This was how Yeats characterized the seeming collapse of society between the Wars. The 1920s were Roaring in America (but that would end with a bust and a Great Depression). In Germany, the 1920s were abysmally bad: hyperinflation and immorality, the Cabaret, Anita Berber, poverty, prostitution, despair—that was life for Germans in the wake of the Versailles Treaty. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” published in 1922 and Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) are two literary works that bear out Yeats assessment that “surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand”—i.e., that the end of times is near—only, instead of Christ appearing on a cloud to judge mankind, it is the anti-Christ, the “Spiritus Mund” (spirit of the world)—“lion body and the head off a man / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” heading towards to the birthplace of Christ to supersede the Son before His final and triumphant return. In other words, Yeats’ poem announces that the end may be near, but things are going to get much worse before they get better. Indeed, it was a prescient thought as WWII broke out less than two decades later. Eliot echoed Yeats’ sentiment and Remarque represented it in concrete, realistic terms—by recalling the bitterness of the first war and what it brought about.
Eliot provides a “requiem for a dry and sterile culture” as Fiero (2010) notes (p. 402) in “The Waste Land”—a poem that consists of fragments—throwbacks to other works from the past—from Dante to Shakespeare to the Bible. Eliot is looking at the post-WWI world and shaking his head at the ebullience and effervescence of the West as it celebrates its victory over Germany and blindly stumbles in its own self-righteousness, unaware of the corruption at its own heart. The modern world had rejected the values of the Old World. It had jettisoned the past, and now looked at itself as something cute, something whole, something special—not realizing it was like Frankenstein’s monster: a pieced-together scrap heap of various parts trying to be whole and failing: “He who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying” (Eliot, 1922, ln. 8-9). In the Old World, water was the symbol of baptism—the symbol grace, new life, re-birth. In the modern world, “there is no water” (ln. 38) and there is only “dry sterile thunder without rain” (ln. 21), and there is no society, no meaningful friendship as a result: for grace and life and baptism are the foundations of charity—and if they are absent—if there is no grace to be obtained—there is no fellowship: “There is not even solitude in the mountains / But red sullen faces sneer and snarl / From doors of mudcracked houses” (ln. 22-24). Brother is turned against brother, so that each one is standing in the other’s lot. There is no welcome, nor happiness, no peace. The splendor of the ‘20s for the West was a façade—and Eliot knew it. He understood that what is past is prologue—and that the horrors of WWI were but a first chapter in a much larger work that was set to play out. The misery that had been visited upon the Europeans was not contained and not containable. It would spill out, as it did, finally, in the 1930s—and the Red Menace from the East would come slouching its way Westward (towards Bethlehem) with a few states in Europe opposing it, while the U.S. and the UK would join it to finally and utterly crush what was left of the Old World in Europe in WWII. Eliot’s Waste Land was thus a kind of dirge for the Old World—an acknowledgment of what Yeats suggested: things were about to get much worse.
Remarque confirmed as much with his book published just as the crash was happening in America in 1929. He describes his time in the war on the Western front in sobering terms—offering up for the West a prologue of the work to come—the work that Eliot anticipated, the work that Yeats described as that of a “rough beast” surely making preparations for a follow-up to WWI—a follow-up that would conclude with a climax that usher in the spirit of disintegration on a global scale (the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the evaporation of hundreds of thousands of lives in the blink of an eye, a flash of a moment, would serve as the signal that the new spirit was upon the world). Remarque used dismal words to say it simply: “An indigent looking wood receives us” (ln. 1). This is not the forest of life, not the tree of life, not the Old World wood in which life and shelter and harmony could be established: this wood was indigent—poor—impoverished. It offered nothing in the way of food, shelter, or harmony. The times were out of joint and nature was echoing as much.
Remarque described the soldiers as “a column—not men at all” (ln. 16)—people sent out into war for some reason that is never discussed: they have no seeming knowledge or intelligence of what it is they are doing there. All they know is that they are there, walking, marching—and then they are there dying, getting blown to bits by a shelling: bombs falling from the skies, blowing the earth into deep pits and blowing up the corpses buried there (they are in a graveyard). The author describes the shelling and the subsequent gassing with such vivid depictions that the reader is able to feel what it must have been like to be there in the moment. The soldier is helpless, defenseless, unable to do anything but crawl and squirm into the mud, hoping that the next bomb will not fall on him. He feels his body being pelted and reamed by the explosions all around him—dirt and mud and bodies flying into his face as he feels his arm, his head, his leg to make sure he is still whole. His helmet saves his life, his sleeve is torn away, the gas masks are pulled out as poison is dropped from above: if the bombs do not kill them, perhaps the gas will. It is a horror—a nightmare—a reality. This reality was behind them now, a decade old—a memory. And yet it was also before them, too: it was the prologue—more was yet to come and more did come. The final nail in the coffin of the Old World was finally hammered in at the end of WWII. The “rough beast” had reached Bethlehem and founded a state for itself.
What Remarque showed in All Quiet on the Western Front and what Eliot showed in The Waste Land was that Yeats was right: “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.” The anarchy was real—and the blood tide was still rising. Innocence was lost. Conviction was lost. Passion and frenzy were all that remained—and that was so at all levels of society—not just the low, but the upper levels, too. Eliot saw as much: he was one of the most well-read poets of the 20th century: he saw and felt which way the wind was blowing. “The Waste Land” was a reflection of what had come and what was coming down the lane behind it. It was more war, more destruction, more chaos, more emptiness, more isolation and desolation. The dropping of the atom bombs on Japan in 1945 would not be the end of the war but rather a new declaration of war—war on the gift of humanity, on the gift of life, on hope. From that point on, it would be nothing but continuous war—hot war, cold war, economic war, cultural war. And it still goes on today: the wood is indigent, the water is gone.
References
Fiero, G. (2010). The Humanistic Tradition. NY: McGraw-Hill.