叶芝在2016

叶芝的“The Second Coming”作于1919年，时值一战结束，面对满目疮痍的欧洲，诗人有感而发：

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?

​叶芝这首诗被认为是现代诗的代表，是被收录率最高的英文诗之一，先后被收入各种诗集。最早的版本在第17行处分行，该行起始的“reel”最初是“wind”，而第13行冒号后最初的文字是：a waste of desert sand。另，“Spiritus Mundi”是拉丁语，原意是“world spirit”，叶芝用之形容存在于宇宙间的万众之魂（the collective soul of the universe），其保有自创世以来的全部“记忆”，是为所有诗人的灵感之源。

因其“现代性”，这首诗中的一些字汇和诗行曾多次被用作小说、歌曲、电视剧集、音乐专辑以及文集的名字。有人使用道琼斯旗下检索工具Factiva发现，去年头七个月该诗的引述率超过前三十年之任何一年，所谓“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” 是为英国脱欧、川普问世之于社会的回响。