Turning and turning in the widening gyre (1) (2)
The falcon (3) cannot hear the falconer (4) (5);
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy (6) is loosed upon the world (7),
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned (8);
The best lack all conviction (9), while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand (10);
Surely the Second Coming is at hand (11);
The Second Coming (12)! Hardly are those words out
When the vast image out of Spiritus Mundi (13)
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 indignant (14) desert birds (15).
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep (16)
Were vexed (17) to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (18)
1 Gyre: a circular course or motion (“Gyre”)
2 In W.B. Yeats’ philosophy, history is composed into two gyres. The first gyre is accompanied by a diminishing gyre which reaches its minimum at the same time as the first reaches its widest extent. Each gyre equals roughly two thousand years (Mann 1)
3 “I suppose that I must have put hawks into the fourth stanza because I have a ring with a hawk and a butterfly upon it, to symbolize the straight road of logic, and so of mechanism, and the crooked road of intention: ‘for wisdom is a butterfly and not a gloomy bird of prey’” (Weeks 288 qt. from The Collected Poems).
5 In Yeat’s poem, The Wild Swan, the bird will also “not hear the falconer” (same line) (Weeks 288).
6 Anarchy: confusion, chaos, disorder (“Anarchy”)
7 W.B. Yeats believed the era of Christianity was passing. “The Christian era was about the ability to predict the future: the New Testament clearly foretold the second coming of Christ. In the post-Christian era of which Yeats was writing, there was no Bible to map out what the next ‘coming’ would be” (Cohen 2).
8 “The phrase ‘The ceremony of innocence’ is linked to a poem from later in 1919, ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’, where the poet asks “How but in custom and ceremony/ Are innocence and beauty born?’” (Mann 1).
9 Yeats once wrote, “I took satisfaction in certain public disasters, felt sort of ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin” (Cohen 2).
10 This poem was written in 1919, after WW1, Ireland was headed toward civil war, a revolution had just toppled the old Russia (Cohen 1).
11 Yeats believed 1927 was the “Great Year,” where the world must “reverse our era and resume past eras in itself” (Weeks 287, qt. from The Vision).
12 Yeat’s religion = theosophy and the occult. He thought the Christian “era” was coming to an end (Cohen 1).
13 Spiritus Mundi = “spirit of the world” (Cohen 2).
14 Indignant: strong displeasure at something considered unjust, unpleasant, insulting or base (“Indignant”)
15 Another reference to falcons
16 20 centuries = 2000 years = 1 gyre
17 Vex: to irritate, annoy, provoke; to discuss or debate with vigor or at great length (“Vex”)
18 Now that the “Christian era” is coming to an end, Yeats believed there was certainty about the future
