A.D. Nineteen Hundred.

A poem by Madison Julius Cawein

War and Disaster, Famine and Pestilence,
Vaunt-couriers of the Century that comes,
Behold them shaking their tremendous plumes
Above the world! where all the air grows dense
With rumors of destruction and a sense,
Cadaverous, of corpses and of tombs
Predestined; while, like monsters in the glooms,
Bristling with battle, shadowy and immense,
The Nations rise in wild apocalypse.
Where now the boast Earth makes of civilization?
Its brag of Christianity? In vain
We seek to see them in the dread eclipse
Of hell and horror, all the devastation
Of Death triumphant on his hills of slain.