William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
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 Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?
Note, this is the 5,000th post on this blog
3 comments:
Good choice for 5,000. Yeats was right. The real problem is everyone KNOWS their views are correct. All that passionate intensity, it should scare the crap out of you.
Thanks Rat -- the trouble is that no one (or very few) even consider the possibility they could be wrong!!! (Of course, I, being infallible, never need consider the point!)
I memorized this in 1986. I'll leave it your imagination why.
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