The Second Coming - William Butler Yeats poem

Poetry reading of The Second Coming (1919) by W.B. Yeats.
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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?
The Second Coming - written by W.B. Yeats
Narrated by Jordan Harling
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Author image:
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...
By Alice Boughton (Whyte's) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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[@BrainheartMan]

Even truer today than it was when Yeats wrote it! Thank you for posting this!

[@JOKER-kr4uv]

ITS HOUR COME ROUND AT LAST!

[@RachaelReads-xo5hl]

Came to KZbin to find this. Subscribed ❤️🔔, liked 👍, and commenting 💬 for the algorithm.

[@sathyabhamadaly6315]

The lines that resonate for me are: "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" (The Second Coming. W.B. Yeats Seven Centuries of Poetry in English. Ed. John Leonard).

[@MrClean3381]

Same here brother, also 'the centre cannot hold, things fall apart' and 'Twenty centuries of stony sleep' - that's present day my friend 🙁

[@geoc1005]

That first stanza sounds like it was written for today as a creeping, profoundly malevolent totalitarianism infects our world.

[@0xD201d]

i think were getting pretty close!

[@SineadScrap]

Love your readings! Thank you!

[@amandagonzales7803]

So peaceful puts me to sleep

[@davidash2727]

Wonderful.

[@radiophodity]

0:30 The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Dunning-Krueger

[@boxfox2945]

Bring the chaos, tear the center apart, to rain down. Burying' all it beholds.

[@21Hyacinth]

Longfellow

[@thestandingoak]

We, the falcon, really have lost sight of our Falconer. High time we listened for his call and return to his steady arm and guidance.

[@unknownkingdom]

All religonis a hoax

[@firstknight117]

Of course they are. Because you know everything there is to know about everything.@@unknownkingdom

[@kevinkerr9405]

My name is Ozymandis...

[@xotan]

Ozymandias? Look upon my works ye mighty and despair. I can see similarities in the desert setting. But Shelley, by virtue of the age he lived in could never have seen a picture of the Terrible Sphinx - Abu l'Hool, father of terror as it is know in Arabic.

[@garymeadows5280]

Wordsworth: Ode on Intimations of Immortality.

[@goodnightvienna8511]

Cormac McCarthy brought me here - specifically the character of Anton Chigurgh

[@geohaber]

Read Shelly's Ozymandias.

[@avisiktachakraborty3438]

Total subject matter telling.......

[@krishankumarsuthar8370]

From which country do you belong? please tell me. I am from India.

[@littlenewton6]

作为一个中国人，我很难理解这首诗的韵律和意义。

[@stephensollnersawyer1316]

Here comes Marvin the paranoid robot.slouching toward Bethlehem

[@AntPDC]

Gyre is pronounced /jīr/

[@bruadair]

It's said that Yeats himself pronounced it with a hard g sound

[@salahdin6382]

Beth lehem, 2nd coming, Jesus,Jerusalem ,is coming to fight against the oppressors.

[@BruceJackson-lx2dw]

The first paragraph is a prophetic vision of 2024 England, which had degenerated and lost its way spiritually. A vociferous strident and self righteous minority dictates & demands the relatively silent majority to change and conform to new norms -such as redefining marriage/man/woman. It is all too sad: a perversion and malignant mutation of our once Green and Pleasant Land. If we cannot rescue ourselves, will King Arthur return as ancient myth promises ?

[@Doggieman1111]

Horrible recitation