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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 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?
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