The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats 1919
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?
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9 年Great article.
Award-Winning International Young Adult and Children's Author (praised by Sheila Graber, Roisin Meaney and others); Lyricist and Composer.
9 年The words, "Things Fall Apart," are particularly apt with what is happening in the world today.
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9 年A all-time classic — one that inspired me to work backwards, starting with Yeats, and study the British Romantic Revolutionary School. This study changed my life and the very way I looked at poetry and literature. I felt like I had been reborn.