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"The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats
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.
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?