The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats
1865 to 1939
Drag the words to the correct places to complete the poem. To reset the game, click on the "Reset Game" button located below the poem. This will clear all the words you've placed in the blanks, returning them to the word bank and resetting the poem to its original state with empty blanks.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon ______ hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed ______ is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are ______ of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
______ the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! ______ are those words out
When a vast image out ______ Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of ______ desert
A shape with lion body and the head ______ a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
______ shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony ______
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And ______ rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches ______ Bethlehem to be born?