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The Second Coming

by William Butler Yeats

  1. Turning and turning in the widening gyre
  2. The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
  3. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
  4. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
  5. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
  6. The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
  7. The best lack all conviction, while the worst
  8. Are full of passionate intensity.
  10. Surely some revelation is at hand;
  11. Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
  12. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
  13. When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
  14. Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
  15. A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
  16. A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
  17. Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
  18. Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
  19. The darkness drops again; but now I know
  20. That twenty centuries of stony sleep
  21. Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
  22. And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
  23. Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?