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 toward Bethlehem to be born?