Poetry Corner: "The Second Coming" by William Yeats

Painting by Maxim Katsnelson

I love this creepy little poem, even though I have a more positive outlook on the future, and a Christian outlook on the Second Coming. I frequently find the events of this modern world disturbing and disheartening. And lately, with a lot of stress in my life, I find the line "the center cannot hold" going through my mind over and over again. So, because the groundhog has decided it is winter for another six weeks, I'm giving you a dark poem this month.

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?