The Greenest of my Dreams

The Second Coming

(from Michael Robartes and the Dancer)

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. T

he 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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