Leej: Almost right line; wrong poem. "The Second Coming," all of which is one of my favorite lines:


THE SECOND COMING
By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in its widening gyre,
The falcon cannot hear the falconer.
Things fall apart; the center 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 creature 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
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again, but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony silence
Have been stirred to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

That's from memory: I may have a few errors in line division, maybe a word or two off, and certainly some punctuation errors.

--seed