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Thursday, April 05, 2007

The Second Coming

by William Butler 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?

*Your assignment: name three examples of the worst.

5 comments:

The Last Ephor said...

Three examples in no particular order:

1. Ann Coulter
2. Jane Hamsher
3. Jihadis

miriam sawyer said...

You get an A.

Dick Stanley said...

Gore, Hillary & McCain

Rachel said...

Jimmy Carter, Cindy Sheehan, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

miriam sawyer said...

Rachel: I don't believe Jimmy Carter has any convictions besides his monstrous belief in his own superiority.