TURNING and turning in the widening gyre <br />The falcon cannot hear the falconer; <br />Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; <br />Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, <br />The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere <br />The ceremony of innocence is drowned; <br />The best lack all conviction, while the worst <br />Are full of passionate intensity. <br />Surely some revelation is at hand; <br />Surely the Second Coming is at hand. <br />The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out <br />When a vast image out of i{Spiritus Mundi} <br />Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert <br />A shape with lion body and the head of a man, <br />A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, <br />Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it <br />Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. <br />The darkness drops again; but now I know <br />That twenty centuries of stony sleep <br />Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, <br />And what rough beast, its hour come round at laSt, <br />Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?<br /><br />William Butler Yeats<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-second-coming/
