Monday, April 12, 2010

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
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 Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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 1919

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