slouching towards bethlehem

I may be going to hell for posting this poem on Easter. Plus side: Jews don't believe in hell. Or Easter.

Seriously, though, every year I post a Yeats poem, and every year it isn't this poem, and every year I make some oblique reference to the fact that I'm not posting this poem, and so this year, I am -- whether or not you all had to memorize it in school, as I did. The real truth is that I love this poem.

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: a waste of desert sand;
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
Wind 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?

~William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), The Second Coming, 1919.