The Ceremony of Innocence

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart; the center cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world The blood-dimmed tide is loosed And ev'rywhere 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 the 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 around it wheel Shadows of the indignant desert birds The darkness drops again And now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle ?And what rough beast Slouches towards Bethlehem To be born