The Ceremony of Innocence

This pharase has interested me for years as something to think about. I have my own ideas about what Yeats meant, but would like to know what others think. This could even be a phrase lifted from a scholarly work. I have never researched it, I must admit.

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?

Okay. A ceremony of something is not the thing itself. A ceremony is an empty thing, a symbol of something that may not exist. The ceremony of innocence was drowned, but not innocence itself. Innocence itself had not been around for a long time, maybe thousands of years. Europe had no actual innocence to drown. Its innocence had been an empty ceremony for a long time.

That is my current interpretation, but I do not say it is correct. We may never know what great poets have meant with some of their peculiar and provocative phrases. Maybe they just laid it out there in all it ambiguity for the human race to keep in their cuds and contemplate. Cheers.