Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of Saint John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison.

Heine imagines modern history accelerating toward catastrophes so unprecedented that even the Book of Revelation’s monstrous imagery would be inadequate. By invoking “Saint John” and the “apocalypse,” he frames political and social upheaval as a kind of secular end-times—an era whose violence and moral disorientation demand new symbols. The comparison that Revelation’s beasts would look like “cooing doves and cupids” intensifies the warning: traditional religious and literary metaphors cannot capture the scale of what is coming. The line reflects Heine’s characteristic blend of prophetic rhetoric and irony, using exaggerated contrast to criticize complacency and to suggest that modernity is generating horrors beyond inherited cultural imagination.