things fall apart

THE SECOND COMING


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?

W. B. Yeats