William Butler Yeats, 1921
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
the falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center 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 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?