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?
- William Butler Yeates (1865-1939)
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