| 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 | 5 |
| 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. | 10 |
| The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out | |
| When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi | |
| Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert | |
| A shape with lion body and the head of a man, | |
| A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, | 15 |
| 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, | 20 |
| And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, | |
| Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? | |