The Second Coming
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
The darkness drops again; but now I know
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, andeverywhere
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
