Monday, March 12, 2007

The Second Coming


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?

W.B. Yeats - 1920

3 comments:

Anonymous said...
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amac said...

i wonder what the prev post was..

i wish i was better with poetry. it did get something going in me, i love the lion description.

what's the deal with the egyptian lion?

Ryan Lawrence said...

its a sphinx. you know, body of a lion, head of a man... its in the poem. and the previous post was by some guy who called himself a sorcerer and claimed to be the second coming.