Milton on the Monday After Easter Break
A POEM
Fifteen ‘til seven now
(That’s by my watch which nowadays
Is seven minutes fast to keep me
Rushed enough to make me stay on time)
So maybe it is really twenty-one ‘til
(My having used almost a sixty-second span
To write all this). Whatever. It’s no matter.
The tub is full and I must bathe,
Then dress, then look at Milton notes
and try to get my mind on teaching
how the great blind poet sought
to justify the ways of God to man.
Did he succeed? I rather doubt he did.
But that, like what o’clock it is,
is still no matter. For life is full
and man must bathe and dress himself
and go to meet his day with will that’s free
(as long as it obeys the sovereign Will).
Odd thing. Such freedom almost always tempts
the cat-mind to adventure out
until it meets the Fall and then is able
to agree with Milton’s Satan that
“Myself is Hell.”
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Poetry was once understood to be an anthropological episteme, a way of knowing, if only through a glass darkly.