2011-01-22

Raderna: Yeats, "The Second Coming".

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)
Med anledning av ett tidigare quiz - och av respekt för poeten ifråga - publiceras dikten i sin helhet.

2 kommentarer :

The Loser sa...

En fantastisk dikt - och jag tror att den håller på att bli aktuell igen.

Gabrielle Björnstrand sa...

Jo, det var just det...