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"The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats is one of his most famous and enigmatic poems, written in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I and during the Irish War of Independence. It reflects on the chaos and disintegration of society, foretelling a transformative but ominous new era. Here is the poem:
The Second Coming
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 towards Bethlehem to be born?
This poem captures Yeats' vision of history as cyclical, marked by violent upheavals that herald the birth of a new era. The "gyre" symbolizes this cyclical motion, and the "rough beast" suggests an ambiguous, foreboding force that represents change and renewal, but not necessarily redemption. Its haunting imagery and prophetic tone have made it a landmark in modernist poetry.