The world is always failing. You could write a history of the end of days, and it would cover human existence from the beginning. If we didn’t fairly regularly fall into fits of certainty that Armageddon is upon us, we’d have not much history at all.

Perhaps that’s why “The Second Coming,” possibly the most famous poem William Butler Yeats ever wrote, seems so perpetually new, so constantly on point, so insistently relevant. When Yeats wrote the apocalyptic poem in 1919, he had in mind the slaughter of World War I, which had just ended. And maybe the Communist takeover in the Russian Revolution. And certainly the influenza epidemic that nearly killed his pregnant wife.