William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) THE SECOND COMING 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? The Second Coming was written in 1919 in the aftermath

of the first World War. The above version of the poem is

as it was published in the edition of Michael Robartes and

the Dancer dated 1920 (there are numerous other

versions of the poem). The preface and notes in the book

contain some philosphy attributed to Robartes. This printing of the poem has a page break between lines

17 and 18 making the stanza division unclear. Following

the two most similar drafts given in the Parkinson and

Brannen edited edition of the manuscripts, I have put a

stanza break there. (Interestingly, both of those drafts

have thirty centuries instead of twenty.) The earlier drafts

also have references to the French and Irish Revolutions

as well as to Germany and Russia. Several of the lines in the version above differ from those

found in subsequent versions. In listing it as one of the

hundred most anthologized poems in the English

language, the text given by Harmon (1998) has changes

including: line 13 (": somewhere in sands of the desert"),

line 17 ("Reel" instead of "Wind"), and no break

between the second and third stanza. Yeats, William Butler. Michael Robartes and the

Dancer. Chruchtown, Dundrum, Ireland: The Chuala

Press, 1920. (as found in the photo-lithography edition

printed Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1970.) Yeats, William Butler. "Michael Robartes and the

Dancer" Manuscript Materials. Thomas Parkinson and

Anne Brannen, eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1994. Harmon, William, ed. The Classic Hundred Poems.

New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

