<OOV> 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, & 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. 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 ; & 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? Poets : The Collected Source of Poems W. B. ( 1989 ) back to top Yeats RELATED CONTENT this Discover’s poem