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?