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 @3Spiritus Mundi@1 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? | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...SOLUTIONS by EDMUND CHARLES BLUNDEN AN EPITAPH UPON HUSBAND AND WIFE WHO DIED AND WERE BURIED by RICHARD CRASHAW ARS VICTRIX (IMITATED FROM THEOPHILE GAUTIER) by HENRY AUSTIN DOBSON THE CHILD ALONE: 4. PICTURE-BOOKS IN WINTER by ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON GOOD-NIGHT by PHILIP EDWARD THOMAS |