<P> The poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath of the First World War and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence that followed the Easter Rising, at a time before the British Government decided to send in the Black and Tans to Ireland . Yeats used the phrase "the second birth" instead of "the Second Coming" in his first drafts . </P> <P> Phrases and lines from the poem are used in many works, in a variety of media, such as literature, motion pictures, television and music . Examples of works whose titles draw from "The Second Coming" include: Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart (1958), Joan Didion's essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968), Robert B. Parker's novel The Widening Gyre (1983), the 1996 non-fiction book Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline by Robert Bork, the song "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" by Joni Mitchell from her 1991 album Night Ride Home, in the episode "Revelations" (9 November 1994) of the science fiction television series Babylon 5, the 2003 game Slouching Towards Bedlam, Elyn Saks' autobiography The Center Cannot Hold (2007), and The Sopranos episode "The Second Coming" (2007). </P> <P> A 2016 analysis by Factiva showed that lines from the poem were quoted more often in the first seven months of 2016 than in any of the preceding 30 years . In the context of political turmoil after the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump's election, commentators repeatedly invoked its lines: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold ." </P>

Yeats things fall apart the center cannot hold