Is the End of the World at Hand? Reflecting on Judgment Day with Poetry

Is the world about to end?

Probably not, in the sense that whatever date declared by self-proclaimed prophets for the End of the World ™ is most likely not accurate.

After all, Our Lord himself noted that “concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only” (Matthew 24:36 ESV).

No one knows! So quit it with the complicated calculations and the apocalyptic predictions, already!

(Although I do think that since God has a sense of humor, He might choose to time the Second Coming to happen on one of these dates, just for fun.)

In one sense, then, thinking about “the end of the world” is a complete waste of time.

However, in another sense it’s very fruitful indeed. Because no matter when the exact date of Our Lord’s Second Coming occurs, we know that it will occur. All of our actions ought to be carried out in the awareness that we live in “between times”: between the First Coming of the Our Lord in great humility, and his Second Coming in power and great glory.

Not only that, we can be absolutely certain that even if the Second Coming does not happen in our lifetime, each individual human being will have his or her own, personal Last Day and final reckoning. Death.

I will die. So will you.

In a culture that seems determined to pretend that aging (much less death) can either be postponed indefinitely or simply ignored, anything that gets us to seriously reflect on mortality is worthwhile.

Here are three short podcasts that I did, collected here for convenience, in which I pick up the theme of the “Last Day” and use poetry as a means to reflect on the truly important issues of death, judgment, and resurrection. Click on the title of the poem to go to the blog page that has the text of the poem, or click directly on the audio link for each.

Yeats: “The Second Coming.”  We start with the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who was not himself a Christian. Note that just as in Dante’s Inferno, the name of Christ is never spoken in this poem; this is the perspective of a world that has rejected Christ, and that looks through the bloody haze of strife to the second Advent, with terror rather than joy. Listen to the audio here.

John Donne: Holy Sonnet 4 “At the round earths imagined corners.” In this sonnet, Donne draws us in to reckon the “numberless infinities of souls” and yet brings us, individually, to the foot of the Cross. Listen to the audio here.

Gerard Manley Hopkins: “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection.” The central philosophical image in this poem is that of Nature as changeable, and in the first two thirds of the poem, Hopkins explores what it means for the natural world, and by extension all of humankind’s activities, to be perpetually subject to change. It’s a perspective that leads to darkness and despair (as indeed the materialistic worldview does): if all that we do is “in an enormous dark / Drowned” in the end, what’s the point?  But Hopkins knows that there is more than just matter in motion: he cries “Enough!” and reminds us that the Resurrection of Christ changes everything – because the Resurrection is not just spiritual, but bodily; not a metaphor, but a dynamic reality that Christ experienced and that we too will experience at the Last Day. And so Hopkins’ poem is a joyful response to the coming Judgment Day. Listen to the audio here.

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Related posts:

1. Poetry and Judgment Day: Yeats’ “The Second Coming” (Podcast)
2. The End of the World Is At Hand (Sometime)
3. Poetry and Judgment Day 3: Gerard Manley Hopkins “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection” (Podcast)
4. Poetry and Judgment Day 2: John Donne’s Holy Sonnet 4 “At the round earths imagined corners” (Podcast)
5. Why Is Christmas Important? Reflecting on the Incarnation of Our Lord through Poetry