Apocalyptic times indeed. It is the time of winter solstice, when the change is due to come, The world is burning, there are wars and rumors of wars, a plague is on the land. In the southwestern sky at sunset a new Christmas star follows the Sun, leaving nothing but darkness in its wake. And in Ithaca, an aged king metes and doles unequal laws unto a savage race, that hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not him.

The Second Coming BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1919)

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?