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: a waste of desert sand;

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

Wind 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?

Image via tonyb

Possible tags:

things fall apart but they never leave my heart, recursion (for no reason), biblical, WBY, the birth of the modern, WW1, every job ever, it’s very difficult to find images to go with this poem without hitting it on the head and killing it, rough beasts, poems that could be movies, things I recite when I want to remember how difficult it is to be human, my other image for this is a horsehead nebula, in memory of Keets and Yeats who were two lovely budgies, agony is ecstasy and vice versa, indignant desert birds are the least of your fears, the lion is the lamb.

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