Modified: February 23, 2020
The Second Coming
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.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! No sooner are those words out, than a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight. Somewhere in sands of desert, a beast with lion body and the head of a man, gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, is moving its slow thighs, while all about it reel shadows of indignant desert birds. Darkness falls, 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?