The text is from W. B. Yeats: Selected Poetry.
The Second Coming |
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| Turning and turning in the widening gyre° | circle, spiral | |
| 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° | world spirit | |
| 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. | whirl, turn | |
| The darkness drops again; but now I know | ||
| That twenty centuries of stony sleep | ||
| Were vexed° to nightmare by a rocking cradle, | bothered, shaken | |
| And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, | ||
| Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? |