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.

Yet in his edits over the course of the year, he gradually erased the particularities of the history he was relating — replacing references to the French Revolution, for example, with a general idea of an era dying.

That dying era, he thought, was Christendom’s. The opening stanza relate, in words as memorable as English poetry has ever managed, the sense of a collapsing age. And the second stanza relates that collapse to a mythology of historical cycles — for “twenty centuries of stony sleep,” the “pitiless” rule of pagan power, “Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,” the coming of the Christ child.

Yet at last the old ones wake, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” For Yeats’s birthday — today, June 13 — we might remember that this has been our question at every moment of the past century.

The Second Coming
by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
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.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.