The Second Coming

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, shares the poem "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats to start the new year. Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, and writer, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. Yeats published over 30 poetry collections, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912. He also founded the Irish National Theatre Society and the Abbey Theatre. “The Second Coming” is one of his best known poems, which Berlin has read at the end of the past few years.

Yeats wrote this poem right after World War I, a global catastrophe that killed millions of people. The poem paints a bleak picture, suggesting that civilization’s sense of progress and order is only an illusion, that the centre cannot hold. In the poem, Yeats uses the term “spiritus mundi” which he said is, “a universal memory and a “muse” of sorts that provides inspiration to the poet or writer.”

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 27 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is an instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.