William+Butler+Yeats

CP Brit Home
= William Butler Yeats =

Podcast: [|The Second Coming] by William Butler Yeats media type="file" key="Second Coming.m4a" width="300" height="50" 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.
 * Born June 13, 1865 died January 28, 1939.
 * He is considered one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century.
 * In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. He is known for his volumes of poetry like:
 * //Poems// (1895),
 * //The Wind Among the Reeds//(1899),
 * [|The Tower](1928),
 * //[|The Winding Stair]// (1929).
 * [|The Second Coming]
 * to see more, [|click here]

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: a waste of desert sand; 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 Wind 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?