I am the autumnal sun
With autumn gales my race is run:
When will the hazel put forth its flowers.
Or grape ripen under my bowers?
When will the harvest or the hunter's moon.
Turn my midnight into mid-noon?
        I am all sere and yellow,
        And to my core mellow.
The mast is dropping within my woods.
The winter is lurking within my woods.
And the rustling of the withered leaf
Is the constant music of grief.

In vain I see the morning rise,
        In vain observe the western blaze,
Who idly look to other skies,
        Expecting life by other ways.

Amidst such boundless wealth without,
        I only still am poor within,
The birds have sung their summer out,
        But still my spring does not begin.

Shall I then wait the autumn wind,
        Compelled to seek a milder day,
And leave no curious nest behind,
        No woods still echoing to my lay?

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot 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 innocents 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 the sands of the desert
A shape with a lion body and the face 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 cneturies 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?