[68skylark]

The way I’ve always read that poem, Yates is fretting about the possibility that two thousand years of strife and darkness could be descending on the world. I guess others read it differently.

[dr_lew]

“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?”

In the poem, the twenty centuries have already elapsed,
and from the perspective of 1919, the spectre of looming
cataclysm would have to be an adumbration of WWII,
the way I see it.