Herein Appeareth the Long-Lost Prologue to Paradise Lost
All ye single ladies—nay—all the leftovers too:
Ye womanhood subprime: neither turn
Your eyeballs nor your earholes hitherward—
Id est, to page upon page of Paradise Lost—
Lest spoilt be this iambic innocence
(If anywhere it lapseth, best beware,
The Adversary spouteth all arrhythmia)
With snags syntactical as Vulcan’s net,
From whence the mind must extricate the eyes,
And concepts surface seeming doubly deep,
Framed in the quadrature of lofty airs,
And—having made gratuitous reference
To Zephyrus, Eurus, and Boreas now,
And Notus too—by their divine conspiracy,
Piped through an airhorn of a hugeness big
Which make of many a little lots.
Yea, music, rhythmic though my verses be,
Shall otherwhere attend your thankful holes—
Though most of this I, blind, dictated,
Thus either I was deaf to discord too
Or seething sighs of vaporous disgust
Emitted from the nostrils of my scribes—
And my misogyny recurrent, frank,
Digesting in the bowels of present thought,
Cannot but swiftly transubstantiate
Into a steaming, stinky “fig leaf,”
At which ye witches’ hookèd snouts’d cringe.
Aroint yourselves, wherefore! For the deliverer
Of this admonitory prologue here—
Alas!—doth out his person in the part
To think the reading past his admonition
(Viz, on to page upon page of Paradise Lost)
Might even kindle on the sodden wicks
Within the heart of hearts of chauvinist man
A flame of sympathy for feminism!
For e’en were it swapped the latest modern lens
For early, then this longest of longueurs viewed,
Its woman‐walloping were not excused,
Nay, not against a backdrop, if just removed,
Of Elizabethan arts, and the lead
Authorial such a stage upon,
Whose women characters—from Cleopatra,
To Beatrice and Lady, yea, MacBeth—
Were even with the sex regarded first,
If Eve, born of Adam’s rib and borne
With “sweet reluctant amorous delay”
Could not, “submiss,” but follow secondly.
Besides consider my magnificence,
This not to say magniloquence, was yet
Out‐magnified more songfully by him,
Whose verse I here shall juxtapose with mine:
O thou that with surpassing Glory crownd,
Look'st from thy sole Dominion like the God
Of this new World; at whose sight all the Starrs
Hide thir diminisht heads; to thee I call, [ 35 ]
But with no friendly voice, and add thy name
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy Spheare;
Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down [ 40 ]
Warring in Heav'n against Heav'ns matchless King:
Ah wherefore! he deservd no such return
From me, whom he created what I was
In that bright eminence, and with his good
Upbraided none; nor was his service hard.
The sun reminds him of his former brightness—
Bla, bla—and God almighty smote the bumptious sylph …
And now to counterpoint with Avon’s bard:
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Suppos'd as forfeit to a confin'd doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur'd
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assur'd
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes;
And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.
Whate’er the fuck that means, it soundeth sweeter,
And music be the food of love—nay, nay, nay—oops! that maketh a Satanism.