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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
W. B. Yeats
W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865, the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised,...
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FURTHER READING
Poems About Tragedy and Grief
A Litany
by Gregory Orr
Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100
by Martín Espada
Assault to Abjury
by Raymond McDaniel
Easter 1916
by W. B. Yeats
Facing It
by Yusef Komunyakaa
Hum
by Ann Lauterbach
I measure every Grief I meet (561)
by Emily Dickinson
In Louisiana
by Albert Bigelow Paine
Memorial Day for the War Dead
by Yehuda Amichai
Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Richard Cory
by Edwin Arlington Robinson
September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden
Stillbirth
by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
The Stolen Child
by W. B. Yeats
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The Second Coming  
by W. B. 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?
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