Arch Alfred McKillen’s “Apocalypse” pictures a future grown from present violence and fear. The speaker describes the “weary, the wretched, the slain” as seeds, and the coming dead as a harvest. The poem moves through images of farming turned sinister: furrowed fields are ruined dreams, the plow is madness, and fear has entered the heart. The tone is sorrowful and ominous, not sensational. The speaker seems trapped between memory and prophecy, asking how anyone can welcome the reaper when autumn arrives and spring’s hope is cut down by despair. It is a tightly compressed vision of war as a cycle that consumes human life like a crop, leaving no real harvest except ghosts. The mood is bleak, elegiac, and quietly horrified.
Apocalypse — Summary
These are the seeds of the future, The weary, the wretched, the slain. These are the ghosts we shall harvest In wars that shall come again.
These are the fields we have furrowed, The dreams that have fallen apart, And this is the plow of our madness, The fear that has entered the heart.
Oh, how shall we welcome the reaper When autumn shall fill the air, When all the hope of the springtime Is cut with the edge of despair?