Vexed to Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle—The 2026 Horror of W. B. Yeats' "The Second Coming"

I've had a poem stuck in my head, and it isn't one of biophilia and whimsy. It's about liminality, death, and interregna. Let me read for you one of my favorites and one of the all-time classics of Enlighs literature, William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming".

While beautiful for its own sake, I'll also make a case for the defense of useless things, an argument for the horror genre as a serious art form, and a close reading of a poem that has become a kind of shared vocabulary for moments when the center will not hold.

I work through the imagery line by line, and connect it to everything from Frankenstein and Genesis's exile from Eden, to Tig Notaro's stage presence, to theriantropic madness from The Office's Michael Scott, to H.P. Lovecraft, to Slavoj Žižek on Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, and more.

The trigger wasn't climate policy rollback or the war in Iran, as you might guess—it was actually thinking about artificial general intelligence, and that the falcon that can no longer hear the falconer.

Listen in to hear more about why "The Second Coming" reads as present-progressive horror rather than past-tense lament, why "troubles my sight" is a master class in economy of language, what monsters are actually for (the etymology connects to the Spanish mostrar—to show; which I minorly mispronounce in my freestyling—forgive me!), how Hereditary, The Babadook, and Jordan Peele's films use horror to talk about grief, depression, and race, and why this liminal moment between world orders feels so monstrous: not because the new world has arrived, but because the rough beast is only now slouching toward Bethlehem.

"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters."

- Antonio Gramsci

Resources

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"The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats

Paul Muldoon's reading of "The Second Coming"

In Praise of the Useless Life: A Monk's Memoir by Paul Quenon (referenced via Thomas Merton)

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion

Eschatology on Wikipedia

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan

Paris 1919 (album) by John Cale

Pervert's Guide to Cinema — Slavoj Žižek on Hitchcock's The Birds

Segment on The Birds

Treaty of Versailles

Treaty of Trianon (I didn't mention this by name, but I've been thinking a lot about how it shaped/shapes Central Europe.)

Hereditary

The Babadook

Jordan Peele

HP Lovecraft

Id, ego, superego in Freudian psychoanalysis

Michael Scott's theriantrope fantasy/nightmare/prophecy from The Office