The Second Coming

W. B. Yeats · written 1919; published 1920

Catalog grade guidance: 9–12

22 content lines · 164 words · Est. recitation about 1 min 31 sec (approx.)

Public-domain text for reading and recitation practice. Source: Wikisource transcription of W. B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Churchtown, Dundrum: Cuala Press, 1920 [issued 1921]), pp. 19-20.Estimated time uses ~120 words/minute plus short pauses—not a contest rule.

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?