A falcon spirals outward beyond the reach of the falconer, and in that single image an entire civilization begins to unravel. Written in 1920, in the aftermath of the Great War and amid the violence of the Irish War of Independence, this poem captures the vertigo of a world losing its center. The gyre widens, the ceremony of innocence drowns, and somewhere in the desert a vast shape with the body of a lion and the head of a man stirs toward wakefulness. Yeats draws on his private mythology and on centuries of apocalyptic tradition to forge twenty-two lines that feel less written than prophesied. The rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem has never arrived, and has never stopped arriving.