[Prev | Next] Created 8/12/1996 by Brad DeLong
Mother Pages: [Twentieth Century Poems|Twentieth Cent. Econ. History]
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The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre/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, 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?
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Professor of Economics J. Bradford DeLong, 689 Evans
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
(510) 643-4027phone (510) 642-6615 fax
delong@econ.berkeley.edu
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/
Send e-mail to Brad DeLong at delong@econ.berkeley.edu