Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere, The best lack all conviction, while the worst, The Second Coming! Rebuilding when current house has a mortgage. There isn’t an easy way to analyse this poem, if that is what you’re asking. The widening gyre of heavy-handed allusions to Yeats’s “The Second Coming.”. Judge Bork, who a few years earlier was nominated to the Supreme Court of the U.S. but was not confirmed by the Senate, contends that the rough beast of Western society is finished being born at Bethlehem and is headed straight for Gomorrah. There is also a book by a former judge named Robert Bork called Slouching Towards Gomorrah, published in 1996. Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. But how many of them get it right? Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. What does “kettle at the heel” mean in this Yeats poem, “The Tower”? Metaphors evoke images which evoke experiences. I'll get there. We’d expect the rough beast to “plod,” like a limping monster in a horror movie or the killer in No Country for Old Men (which itself, of course, takes its title from another of Yeats’s lines, in “Sailing to Byzantium”). No probs. Stack Exchange network consists of 176 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. But then what is the "rough beast" which the question asks about? Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe 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 everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity. But plodding is a conscious action; slouching is not. Yeats’s lines work outside their context because the word pairings are brilliant in and of themselves. Slouchy though they may be, the misapplications amount to a tribute. Beware of interpretations along the lines of, "If this were an essay, the author would be saying." This is a problematic theory because it doesn't account for the "twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle", an unambiguous reference to Christianity, and, presumably, its incredibly bloody history during most of that period. Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? “Romney slouching toward GOP nomination.”. "The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919, first printed in The Dial in November 1920, and afterwards included in his 1921 collection of verses Michael Robartes and the Dancer. n/a Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989) ... William Butler Yeats is widely considered to be one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.