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Hello, and thank you for visiting Yeats' The Second Coming: A New Presentation and for visiting this page, which indicates your desire to aid the project. Here is how:
(1) At a number of points in the presentation, you will notice tiny heads of William Butler Yeats superimposed on individual book covers, indicating that the book pictured does not exactly match the text of "The Second Coming." For example, on the seventh page of our treatment, you will see :
 This book is included as a sort of place-marker until I can locate a book entitled, simply: Worst. (2) Where I have had to fudge -- such as by using
 and  in place of the word surely, or
 and  in place of the word loosed, I would prefer, of course, to have the actual word from the poem. (3) Where you see a word in the presentation, rather than a book cover, I have found nothing that fits. Any help in remedying these lapses would be much appreciated. Some books that I know exist and would fit are:
Many thanks, |
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The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
Surely some revelation is at hand;
The darkness drops again; but now I know
By W.B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats
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 everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction; the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
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 about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
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 toward Bethlehem to be born?