Happy National Poetry Month — this is the poem that I believe I liked best from among those I was taught at Longwood High School.

While everybody else loves its closing lines, my favorite line is the one about the falcon.

Eagle-eyed horror fans might also recognize this as the poem recited by the doomed general in Stephen King’s “The Stand” — both the book and television miniseries adaptation (though King has the character mispronounce the name as “YEETS”).

Thanks to Poem of the Week for the text:  http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html

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?