Sometimes there's just no other good way of saying it

I've been reading a lot about Victorian poetry lately (that exam thingy's to blame) and realized that I really like these two poems; mostly its their poetry, but I also like the speaker's perception and use of imagery to convey what is, after all, a rather bleak outlook. Even though they were written almost a hundred years apart, they really do say the same thing... and it seems to me that this apocalyptic vision still appeals to me today in my bleaker moments.

The Kraken

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
- 1830

The Second Coming

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 conviction, 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 steep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
- 1920

Don't think the idea of putting these two together is solely mine. I've been reading Carol Christ's Victorian and Modern Poets, and although she doesn't juxtapose these two particular poems, she does talk about Yeats' relationship to Tennyson, something I think is certainly evident in these two poems.