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The Second Coming
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Written in 1922
by the Irish playwright &
poet W. B. Yeats
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| This poem is often quoted. Erica Jong titled
one of her novels "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" and you'll find the phrase
"ceremonies of innocence" in Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row". |
| Two other commonly quoted lines are "Things fall
apart; the centre cannot hold" and "The best lack all convictions, while
the worst Are full of passionate intensity." |
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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? |
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