The Second Coming...

Any Good Poem

Richard Berlin, MD, welcomes the New Year by sharing the poem, "The Second Coming," by William Butler Yeats. “The Second Coming” is one of his best known poems and still feels relevant. Yeats wrote the poem right after World War I, a global catastrophe that killed millions. The poem paints a bleak picture, suggesting that civilization’s sense of progress and order is only an illusion, that the centre cannot hold.

Dr Berlin has been writing a poem about his experience of being a doctor every month for the past 26 years in Psychiatric Times in a column called “Poetry of the Times.” He is instructor in psychiatry, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, Massachusetts. His latest book is Tender Fences.