| The Second Coming |
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| 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 | 5 |
| 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. | 10 |
| The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out | |
| When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi | |
| 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 | 15 |
| 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, | 20 |
| Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? | |
| gyre — a three-dimensional spiral. Yeats thought of history as consisting of gyres, meaning that it progressed in a circular movement as time advanced. | |
| Second Coming — in the Christian mythos, the return of Jesus to establish the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. | |
| Spiritus Mundi — literally Spirit World in Latin. For Yeats, it refers to a kind of collective unconscious trove of symbolism to which certain poets and mystics have access. | |
| Bethlehem — the birthplace of Jesus according to most Christian traditions | |
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