William Butler Yeats: The Second Coming

 The Second Coming

 

 William Butler Yeats

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?

Gemini says,

Written by William Butler Yeats in 1919 amidst post-World War I and revolutionary turmoil, "The Second Coming" is a powerful and frequently quoted modern poem reflecting profound global collapse and moral crisis. Rather than a traditional spiritual rebirth, Yeats employs imagery of a widening gyre and a sphinx-like "rough beast" to envision an ominous, chaotic new era displacing two millennia of civilization. The poem memorably captures societal decay where the best lack conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.