3The Second Coming! Hardly are those words outThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;Are full of passionate intensity.Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Turning and turning in the widening gyreWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,Surely some revelation is at hand;A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,A shape with lion body and the head of a man,Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The best lack all conviction, while the worstTroubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desertSurely the Second Coming is at hand.The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereSlouches towards Bethlehem to be born?And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,The darkness drops again; but now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepWhen a vast image out of Spiritus MundiIs moving its slow thighs, while all about it