2. The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats - A Friend to Dominic

In this first full episode of our podcast, you will hear Dominic talking about the poem that has been a friend to him: ’The Second Coming’ by W. B. Yeats.

Dominic visited The Poetry Exchange at St Chad’s College Chapel, as part of Durham Book Festival in October 2015. We’re very grateful to Durham Book Festival, New Writing North and St Chad’s College for hosting The Poetry Exchange. Do visit them for further inspiration!

Dominic is in conversation with The Poetry Exchange team members Fiona Lesley Bennett and Michael Shaeffer.

'The Second Coming' is read by Michael Shaeffer

*****

The Second Coming

by W.B. Yeats

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: somewhere in 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?

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

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