Ninety years ago, Mr. Yeats wrote this poem to express his concerns that the heavy-handed resolution of the Great War and the upheavals of the Russian Revolution were poised to rent the fabric of the civilized world for decades to come. History has shown that those concerns were well-founded. We now find ourselves asking whether those words will be as prophetic as they are appropriate to our current affairs of state.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
the falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center 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 the 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 shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of 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?
W.B. Yeats, 1919
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