This poem was used very effectively at the end of a pretty good book called The Year of the Comet by John Christopher published back in the 1950s, but set in the year 2000. He used it as a way of indicating that things in the world of the book, at the turn of the millenium, would never be the same again.

He got a lot of things pretty right too. It's been reprinted this year I gather. Worth reading.

It was a world where the old states were long dead. Now men owed allegiance to vast world-dominating business groups rather than to countries. But the conflicts were just as bitter and violent as in the old days of war between nations.

One thing this year has confirmed - those of us who were bloody minded enough to insist that the first year of thye 21st century was 2001 and not 2000 have been shown to have been only too right. And Yeats bleak poem fits into that.