Saturday, September 12, 2009

The Second Coming -- William Butler Yeats [minstrels]

The Second Coming

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: somewhere in 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?

-- William Butler Yeats  Nov. 1920

(W. B. Yeats, b. Dublin, June 13, 1865, d. Jan. 28, 1939) [src: Katharena Eirmann, 'The Magic of Yeats']
source, books: http://harrold.org/rfhextra/books.html reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)

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