Fairly famous lines from W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming. He was talking about apocalypse, the end of the world. The lines can be used to convey a lot more than that. They fit for anything that ends badly. Taken as they are outside of the poem, there are a couple of things I tend to take with them.
In particular the line “things fall apart”. It’s a flat statement. Things. Fall. Apart. Full stop, end of story. It’s also both a prediction and destiny. Depending on what actually happens, I read it as; things have fallen apart, it was always going to happen, they just do. Or I can read it as; things will fall apart, it will always happen, they just do. I don’t know why, I just take it like that.
The other thing is a sense of wistfulness. When I hear the words in my mind or the words spring to mind, there is always a wistful sense about them. As if the words or saying yes things have fallen apart and its a shame. It would have been better if they didn’t.
Maybe it is just me, but I have my own interpretations of the words and the meaning and yes at the end of the day, “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”.