The Second Coming, by W.B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
The falcon can no longer 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 is that phrase out
When an image out of Anima Mundi arises to trouble me.
A desert scene: A shape with lion body
And the head of a man
Is moving its slow thighs, its gaze
Blank and pitiless as the sun's, as around it reel
The shadows of 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 at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
***
Again, I am a bit fuzzy on the middle. But there it is. This might be my favorite free-verse poem ever. I'm not sure I know what it means to me (Yeats intended it as a sort of prophecy of the transition out of the age of Pisces into the age of Aquarius, I think), but it's gripping.