W.B. Yeats

Out of all the things I found interesting about Yeats, the many rejections of marriage given to him by Maud Gonne had to be the one that took the cake. He even said that all the love poems before his marriage to his child hood friend George were about Gonne. And how does she repay him? She marries a drunken solider, who by the way later gets executed (Yeats had to smile a little when he saw that on CNN). I do not know about you but that has to be a cold person or she was gave W.B. the wrong signals. Ok now lets get down to his writings. Yeats had an idea that every 2000 years the world starts over. He illustrates this idea in “The Second Coming.” An idea where the world is in complete disarray.

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
(from the second coming)

I guess it would be natural to list such destruction of the world after witnessing the first World War. I focused a lot on the part where it said “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I feel that he is saying that the people who started the war will continue to fight because they are the worse kind of people while the people who tried to keep peace give up and just let it happen. I could just imagine how his mind was after the World War had ended because never before has a War like that happened. I would think the end is near also, because once again as the poem suggest the “worst are full of passionate intensity” and in that case will never stop the fight until all the world is destroyed. Even though it seems very unlikely now, a day after the end of the first World War had to at least keep those people a little paranoid that such a future was going to happen.