The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats 1865 (Sandymount) – 1939 (Menton)



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 i{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?

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on May 01, 2023

49 sec read
1,447

Quick analysis:

Scheme AABCADEFGGHFIJKLMNOPQR
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 913
Words 166
Stanzas 1
Stanza Lengths 22

William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. more…

All William Butler Yeats poems | William Butler Yeats Books

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1 Comment
  • Weissbart
    Written just weeks after World War I ended, this brief, transfixing poem is a perfect harbinger of the events since its publication. Yeats' "rough beast" has been born in many places and times in the 20th and 21st Centuries, and will haunt our species for the foreseeable future. Indeed, given the access to the public mind provided first by radio, then television, and now by the internet, the unfettered, lethal gibbering of political monsters may presage our failure as a civilized species. Rather lengthy for an epitaph, but that may well be what is 
    LikeReply 12 years ago

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