Poetry Response/Explication

This poem is related to Heart of Darkness, but it is also one you may use for a poetry response or a poetry explication or both, if you wish.

Answer the questions for the poetry explication.
Respond with your opinions and feelings for the response.

The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

1. What is the title an allusion to?
2. When Yeats wrote this poem, Ireland was in the midst of a brutal war with England, and the Western world had just experienced World War I (which they called The Great War or the War to End All Wars). How would these two events inspire Yeats to write these verses?
3. Based on context, what does “gyre” mean?
4. What figure of speech is “A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun”?
5. To what does the “rocking cradle” refer?
6. To what does “Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born” refer?
7. What is the tone of this poem? Give at least three examples that support your answer.