"The Second Coming"

View full poem: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-second-coming-by-william-butler-yeats

This animation is part of the TED-Ed series, "There's a Poem for That," which features animated interpretations of poems both old and new that give language to some of life's biggest feelings.

Poem by William Butler Yeats, directed by Eoin Duffy.

"The Second Coming"
by William Butler Yeats

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: somewhere
in 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.

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?