The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats
1865 to 1939
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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?