William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming

[Otto]

William Butler 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 Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the 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?

W.B. Yeats: "A Vision And Related Writings", Selected and edited by A.
Norman Jeffares, Arena, London 1990, p. 330

translation into German and mp3:

http://molochronik.antville.org/stories/1661090/

different translation:

http://myweb.dal.ca/waue/Trans/Yeats-Coming.html

wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Coming_(poem)