THE SECOND COMING

WB 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; /
 

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 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, /