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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
W. B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865, the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised,...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Tragedy and Grief
A Litany
by Gregory Orr
Against Elegies
by Marilyn Hacker
Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100
by Martín Espada
Assault to Abjury
by Raymond McDaniel
Easter 1916
by W. B. Yeats
Facing It
by Yusef Komunyakaa
Hum
by Ann Lauterbach
I measure every Grief I meet (561)
by Emily Dickinson
In Louisiana
by Albert Bigelow Paine
Lycidas
by John Milton
Memorial Day for the War Dead
by Yehuda Amichai
On His Deceased Wife
by John Milton
Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Requiescat
by Matthew Arnold
Richard Cory
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Rose Aylmer
by Walter Savage Landor
September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden
Stillbirth
by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Surprised By Joy
by William Wordsworth, read by Susan Stewart
The Hour and What Is Dead
by Li-Young Lee
The Stolen Child
by W. B. Yeats
Poems for Times of Turmoil
blessing the boats
by Lucille Clifton
Chaplinesque
by Hart Crane
Identity Crisis
by F. D. Reeve
In a Country
by Larry Levis
O Little Root of a Dream
by Paul Celan
O Me! O Life!
by Walt Whitman
Poet's Work
by Lorine Niedecker
The times are nightfall, look, their light grows less
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Thing
by Rae Armantrout
Related Pages
Animated Poems
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The Second Coming  
by W. B. 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?






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About "The Second Coming"

Among other things, "The Second Coming" takes its imagery from Yeats's book, A Vision, a zodiac of sorts that he developed with his wife through "visitations" and automatic writing. Yeats claimed that she was often inhabited by spirits who came in order to describe a universal system of cyclical birth, based around a turning gyre.
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