The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

[conuly]

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?

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Comments

[dine]

so many familiar lines! and I never remember what poem they're from

[conuly]

I can always recite the first verse, and the second I go "um".

[rebeccmeister]

Thanks for this. It is good to read it today.

[dewline]

All too appropriate now.

[larryhammer]

+1

[sabotabby]

fuckin mood

[dewline]

Yup.

[minoanmiss]

Word.

[med_cat]

Apt