…there’d be none of it. Nor would the army’s airborne leap.
Nor could the sensuous love-lorn, half-starved for what they lacked,
hot-headed or cherubic, lapse into complacency —

it’s true. Six hundred words, or maybe more,
first unfurled their syllables to readers (jubilant,
ungenerous, or dismissive) of Milton’s adamantine verse.

And no such reader’s jubilance, nor ungenerosity, nor her dismissiveness
could be, had he not wrote. Nor could we fall
to debauchery unaccountable, or depravity unprincipled,

however much we (oh arch-fiends that we are, or can be, since he wrote)
might try. At least there’d be no chastening.
So let all fallen and unfallen angels sing besottedly,

and long, that Milton epistled, prelatised, and intervolved
opiniastrously. We’d have no pandemonium without him.