The Second Coming
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?
Thanks to Heather Heying; she reads the poem here. While written in 1919 and first published in 1920, it could have been written this morning. See gyre definition; and that is only the beginning of the poem. To say that the poem has aged well is an understatement. Along with W.H. Auden's Funeral Blues (1938) and Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night (1951), it is a masterpiece of the twentieth century. William Butler Yeats won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.
