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 convictions, 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?