William Butler Yeats

      This page is dedicated to
      Joe Stryzinski, author and
      primal force behind the
      Babylon Five TV series.

Selections taken from the superb edition
edited by Richard J. Finneran
(Scribner and Sons, ISBN #0-684-83935-0
The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems)

Link to PDE: Yeats



200

The Second Coming

 Turning and turning in the winding gyre
 The falcon can not hear the falconer;
 Things fall apart; the centre can not 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 comming is at hand.
 The second comming!  Hardly are those words out
 When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
 Troubles my sight; somewhere in the sands of the desert
 A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
 A blank and pitiless in 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?




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