Come let us mock at the great

[Nakosis]

What does this mean to you?
I think I like it but I was never very good with poetry.

This last line...
for we Traffic in mockery
Feels appropriate.

 

[Audie]

Philosophy via pop music

 

[Evangelicalhumanist]

It speaks to both the ephemeral nature of human life -- that we wish to leave monuments and tablets to our achievements, and reminds us that we achieve, most of us, very little that would deserve such remembrance.

It was also very badly read.

 

[RestlessSoul]

What does this mean to you?
I think I like it but I was never very good with poetry.

This last line...
for we Traffic in mockery
Feels appropriate.

I think the core message is, that time makes a mockery of us all, so we would do better not to take ourselves too seriously.

Recent world events keep bringing to mind this poem, also by Yeats

The Second Coming​

BY WILLIAM BUTLER 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 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 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?

 

[osgart]

I think it means that people mock what they don't understand. They laugh in the face of achievement thinking it different or useless because they like to think they have all the answers. Mockery is old fashioned hatred at those that are different, or perhaps a threat to some power that is in fact useless, destructive, and pervasive.