THE SECOND COMING
by William Butler Yeats {ending clause by Richard S. Tolley}
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 the 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 the 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?
And bats the flies from its tail with carnivorous strokes,
Destroying all hope of a final resurrection
By solemnly declaring the dark white-speckled abyss empty,
With no God but he to wrest the virgin bride from her somnolence
Threatening self-annihilation of a planisphere; in the name of purity
While the impure, he condemns to a slow rotting in the fires of Hell.
Measuring out souls and anguish with simple, riddled utterances of a God
Through chaffed lips Who will forever after live in paradise with banished, dying immortals
Abandoning the powerful, moving, hallowed works of a Satanic other
Speaking to the masses disparately; in profusion gently rolling away the stone
To welcome God to his forgotten and worldly home; Mans refuge.
From a sonless father and a reincarnate One.
