Falling

So oft as I with state of present time,
The image of the antique world compare,
When as mans age was in his freshest prime,
And the first blossom of fair virtue bare,
Such odds I finde twixt those, and these which are,
As that, through long continuance of his course,
Me seemes the world is run quite out of square,
From the first point of his appointed source,
And being once amiss growes daily worse and worse.

—Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen, V. Proem 1.