William Butler
Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND
COMING
Turning and
turning in the widening gyre
The falcon
cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall
apart; the center 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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?
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