It is the peculiar arrogance of virtually every generation of American culture to assume it will be the last. From the Puritan pilgrims who believed the forbidding coastal wilderness of what they dubbed New England would serve as the soundstage for the new earth ushered in after the rain of destruction promised in Revelation, to contemporary environmentalists and nuclear survivalists, Americans have always seemed comfortable with the logic of end times. Within that mindset, the end of the world is expected with curiously giddy anticipation: The apocalypse, after all, will lay the foundation for the promised new heaven and new earth and would wipe clean the toxic influence of millennia of humanity driven by selfishness, greed, and violence.

Teasdale’s audience lived in a chaotic and violent world apparently coming apart at every seam. That world appeared to justify apocalyptic thought and the hope that such events were indeed the signs and wonders forecast in Revelation. Teasdale plays to that apocalyptic notion, but the poem does not offer the traditional Judeo-Christian restoration of God’s spiritually recharged Eden once humanity has been cleansed. The world will not be renewed with the energy of a Creator God whose power the apocalypse would validate.