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?
-William ButlerYeats
"William Butler Yeats (
//; 13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of
20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish
Senator for two terms. Yeats was a driving force behind the
Irish Literary Revival and, along with
Lady Gregory,
Edward Martyn, and others, founded the
Abbey Theatre, where he served as its chief during its early years. In 1923, he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in Literature as the first Irishman so honoured
[1] for what the
Nobel Committee
described as 'inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives
expression to the spirit of a whole nation.' Yeats is generally
considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works
after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include
The Tower (1928) and
The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929).
[2] Yeats was a very good friend of American expatriate poet and
Bollingen Prize laureate
Ezra Pound. Yeats wrote the introduction for
Rabindranath Tagore's
Gitanjali, which was published by the
India Society.
[3]"
Read more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._B._Yeats
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