Tuesday, June 15, 2010

 

Second Coming, in the Hope of Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon finally heard the falconer;
Things fell together; the centre always held;
Mere love is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide has receded, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is reborn;
The best recall their conviction, while the worst
have forgotten their passionate intensity.

Every day another revelation is at hand;
Surely every Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Propels my sight: somewhere in the depths of each heart
A shape with angel body and the face of a human,
Its gaze warm and enlivening as the sun,
Is stirring its charges awake, while all about it
Reel starlight forms of the friends of the Earth.
The darkness drops again; and now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were carried in slumber by a rocking cradle,
And what glorious being, its hour come round at last,
Rises in you to be born?

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