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The Velveteen Ocelot

(115,267 posts)
Wed Sep 16, 2020, 05:22 PM Sep 2020

Yeats' "The Second Coming" has never been more true and relevant.

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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Yeats' "The Second Coming" has never been more true and relevant. (Original Post) The Velveteen Ocelot Sep 2020 OP
Aye empedocles Sep 2020 #1
Beastly, Sure! But the Antichrist...?! Deacon Blue Sep 2020 #2
He's not *the* Antichrist, but he's *an* antichrist. The Velveteen Ocelot Sep 2020 #3
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