"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?
