An imaginative interpretation of a poem, presented for entertainment purposes only. 

The Second Coming

by W. B. Yeats

Written 1919 

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?

Wikipedia contributors. (2025, January 22). The Second Coming (poem). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)