|
|
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?
The above poem was written in 1919 in the aftermath
of the first World War. It can be found in:
Yeats, William Butler. Michael Robartes and the
Dancer. Chruchtown, Dundrum, Ireland: The Chuala
Press, 1920. (as found in the photo-lithography edition
printed Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970.)
The various manuscript revisions of the poem also have
references to the French and Irish Revolutions as well
as to Germany and Russia. They can be found in:
Yeats, William Butler. "Michael Robartes and the
Dancer" Manuscript Materials. Thomas Parkinson and
Anne Brannen, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1994.
Harmon (1998) lists it as one of the hundred most
anthologized poems in the English language.
Harmon, William, ed. The Classic Hundred Poems.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.
|