The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

“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?