Friday, August 22, 2014

A POEM FOR TODAY FROM 1919 BY WB YEATS

the sphinx in snow last winter


     THE SECOND COMING


     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 was 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 a 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 toward Bethlehem to be born?


                                       ---WB Yeats, 1865-1939


pyramids in snow last winter


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