9 August 2014
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 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?
~W. B. Yeats
(1865–1939)
Printings: The Dial (Chicago), November 1920;
The Nation (London), 6 November 1920;
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Dundrum: Cuala, 1921);
Later Poems (London: Macmillan, 1922; 1924; 1926; 1931).
H/T Neo-Neocon ISIS, the rough beast
Related: Mike Huckabee (video):
“We need to be clear in calling out evil for what it is. When people will behead a child, and when people will leave people starving on top of a mountain without food or water – 40,000 of them – I don’t care what religion it is: It’s evil.”
