#1
Nationality:
Themes:
Emotions:
Topics:
Form:
Genres: Lyric
support@poemanalysis.com
Poem Solutions Limited
Company no: 10883994
United Kingdom
Poetic explorations of the apocalypse are incredibly varied. But, each suggests that the world will at some point end, and usually in a spectacular and catastrophically terrifying way.
Unstoppable destructive winds, raging fires, all-consuming floods, and overwhelming darkness that sweep the world are all ways poets have envisioned the end of the world throughout time.
Depictions of the apocalypse are found in all cultures and all continents. They vary according to religious beliefs and what the contemporary moment suggests. For example, poetic renderings of a nuclear apocalypse in the 1960s during the Cold War and climate disasters (including fires and floods) in the early 2000s due to polar ice melting and uncontrollable forest fires.
Religion is not required to appreciate these evocative portrayals of the end of the world, and it’s hard to avoid feelings of fear, despair, and helplessness while reading about the creative ways poets see the planet, or just humanity, shuddering to a close.
William Butler Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ delves into the hopeless atmosphere of post-World War I Europe through apocalyptic imagery.
That 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?
Cummings’ ‘what if a much of a which of a wind’ presents different fragmented apocalyptic visions in an experimental language.
what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer’s lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
‘A Song on the End of the World’ by Czeslaw Milosz is an impactful poem that takes a paradoxical view of the apocalypse as a means of underscoring the surreality of facing cataclysm.
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
‘The Powwow at the End of the World’ by Sherman Alexie is a stunning poem that reveals the apocalyptic price of an indigenous person’s forgiveness.
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
and topples it. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the floodwaters burst each successive dam
‘Darkness’ by Lord Byron is a foreboding poem that predicts haunting consequences for humanity in the rapidly changing modern world.
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
‘Fire and Ice’ by Robert Frost explores a universal interest in the apocalypse. It has always been a phenomenon capable of capturing people’s minds.
Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
‘They Feed They Lion’ by Philip Levine is a powerful poem that visualizes a scene of apocalyptic proportions. It was inspired by the aftermath of the 1967 Detroit riots.
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
Auden’s ‘Consider This and in Our Time’ captures a society poised on the brink, blending serene imagery with ominous undertones of political upheaval.
As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman:
The clouds rift suddenly - look there
At cigarette-end smouldering on a border
At the first garden party of the year.
This poem is a small but perfectly formed beauty. William compares love itself to nature in a lilting poem with a tight rhyme scheme that can’t help but inspire the reader’s inner cupid.
Love is enough: though the World be a-waning,
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover
‘Waking in Winter’ by Sylvia Plath tells the story of hotel residents. They’re living different lives but are unified through their hopelessness.
I can taste the tin of the sky — the real tin thing.
Winter dawn is the color of metal,
The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.
All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations —
‘Alarum’ by Amanda Gorman speaks about extinction and the climate crisis, alluding to the fate of humankind if nothing changes.
We're writing as the daughter of a / dying world / as
its new-faced alert. / In math, the slash / also called
the solidus / means division, divided by. / We were
divided / from each other, person / person. / Some
‘We Live to Kill and Kill to Live’ by Gabriel Okara is a poem that looks at humanities intrinsic relationship with war.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki-bombs
Holocaust, Germany
Genocide, Bosnia Herzegovina, nuclear bombs!
Rwanda, Burundi, Genocide, fragmentation bombs.
‘Caliban upon Setebos’ by Robert Browning delves into Caliban’s contemplation of God’s power, nature, and his place in the universe.
'Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin,
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
‘The Bard: A Pindaric Ode’ written by Thomas Gray, depicts the ruthless torment unleashed upon poets by the tyrant King Edward I.
"Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!
Confusion on thy banners wait,
Tho' fann'd by Conquest's crimson wing
They mock the air with idle state.
support@poemanalysis.com
Poem Solutions Limited
Company no: 10883994
United Kingdom
Access Poetry PDF Guides
for this Poem
Complete Poetry PDF Guide
Perfect Offline Resource
Covers Everything You Need to Know
One-pager 'snapshot' PDF
Great Offline Resource
Gateway to deeper understanding
870+ Reviews
