The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats 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?