# The Second Coming — W. B. Yeats

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 001: Wild, wild times](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/1/the-second-coming
- **Type**: Poem (Broadside)
- **Creator**: W. B. Yeats
- **Original Source**: [W. B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Cuala Press, 1920), pp. 19–20](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Michael_Robartes_and_the_Dancer/The_Second_Coming) (1920) · 1 minute
- **Published**: 2026-10-31

## Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

I read this poem for the first time about a year ago, and it's stuck in my head. It's haunting, and if you read it, you can't help but see all the parallels to our present state of things, even though the poem was written after World War I, which was and is and still remains one of the greatest human catastrophes of all time. What makes the poem so powerful is the imagery it evokes in your mind. None of it is really good. Blood-dimmed horrors it is.

## Verbatim Excerpt (W. B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Cuala Press, 1920), pp. 19–20, matched word for word)

> 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: 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?

## Wikipedia Entities & Concepts

- [W. B. Yeats](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._B._Yeats): William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and literary critic who was one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature.