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 convictions, 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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
4 comments:
This poem has long been a favourite of mine, and is one I studied back in the autumn of last year as part of the 'modern poets' component of my MA. It's incredibly powerful. Thank you for reminding me of it; it was a wonderful surprise to visit your blog today and find it facing me. x
It really such hard time right now with all is happening next to us...I have been feeling f
down
I return to this again today, as I have been thinking of this poem and the fact that I see Yeats as one of many poet-prophets produced by the 20th Century, another one of note for me being Allan Ginsberg.
The section of the poem as you quoted it is fearfully prescient; it is with sorrow I read it in an altogether new light.x
Synchronicity: don't you find it fascinating that at SHWC, one of the people taking your path has a use-name referring to a type of falcon, and she actually attended the Yeats school in Ireland for a week on a scholarship? ::evil grin::
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