]> The Second Coming An electronic edition William Butler Yeats Electronic edition compiled and proof-read by Beatrix Färber School of History, University College, Cork First draft. 718 CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College, Cork
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2014 CELT online at University College, Cork, Ireland. E910001-066

The works by W. B. Yeats are in the public domain. This electronic text is available with prior consent of the CELT programme for purposes of private or academic research and teaching.

 This poem was written January 1919 and first published in The Dial in November 1920 (A. Norman Jeffares, p. 238). Literature (a small selection) W. B. Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats, consisting of Reveries over childhood and youth, The trembling of the veil, and Dramatis personae (New York 1938). Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks. Corrected edition with a new preface (Oxford 1979). [First published New York 1948; reprinted London 1961.] Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan 1957). W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (New York: Macmillan 1961). W. B. Yeats, Explorations: selected by Mrs W. B. Yeats (London/New York: Macmillan 1962). Richard Ellmann, The Identity of Yeats (New York 1964). A. Norman Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W.B. Yeats (Stanford 1984). A general bibliography is available online at the official web site of the Nobel Prize. See: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1923/yeats-bibl.html The edition used in the digital edition William Butler Yeats The Second Coming Richard J. Finneran The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats Macmillan Press London 1991 189–190

CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts

The whole poem.

The text has been proof-read twice.

The electronic text represents the edited text.

The editorial practice of the hard-copy editor has been retained.

div0= the individual poem, stanzas are marked lg.

Names of persons (given names), and places are not tagged. Terms for cultural and social roles are not tagged.

 1919 The poem is in English. literary poetry W. B. Yeats 20c 2014-05-01 Beatrix Färber ed. File parsed and validated; SGML and HTML files created. 2014-05-01 Beatrix Färber ed. Structural markup applied according to CELT practice; TEI header created with bibliographical detail. 1996 Students at the CELT Project, UCC ed. First proofing. 1996 Donnchadh Ó Corráin data capture Text captured 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 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?