Easter, 1916

A collection of 15 of Yeats' most famous poems, including ""Easter, 1916" and "The Second Coming." "Easter, 1916" chronicles Yeats' complicated feelings on the execution of Irish patriots of the Easter Rebellion in Dublin."The Second Coming" is viewed as a prophetic poem that envisions the close of the Christian epoch and the violent birth of a new age. The poem's title makes reference to the Biblical reappearance of Christ, prophesied in Matthew 24 and the Revelations of St. John, which according to Christianity, will accompany the Apocalypse and divine Last Judgment. Other symbols in the poem are drawn from mythology, the occult, and Yeats's view of history as defined in his cryptic prose volume A Vision. The principal figure of the work is a sphinx-like creature with a lion's body and man's head, a "rough beast" awakened in the desert that makes its way to Christ's birthplace, Bethlehem.