When passing the rancid pit of a fast-food joint the reader will have witnessed with horror the rabid rat-lines of customers crowding from door to counter, and Milton serves the ready answer:
Millions of spiritual Creatures walk the Earth
Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep (IV:677-678)
Satan, ever the deep-fried whinger, broiling behind the counter of his new job at Snakes-R-Us at downtown Garden of Eden:
O foul descent! that I who erst contended
With Gods to sit the highest, am now constraind
Into a Beast, and mixt with bestial slime (IX:163-165)
A counterpart to the serial customers at McDonald’s, Satan the offender digests a foetid lesson: ‘The miserie, I deserv’d it’ (X: 727).
And musing with more honesty than any gristle-headed politician:
But what will not Ambition and Revenge
Descend to? who aspires must down as low
As high he soard, obnoxious first or last
To basest things. Revenge, at first though sweet,
Bitter ere long back on it self recoils (IX:168-172)
The stoic heroes of a human race despite ratty inbred faults incubate a raw-throated protest against a stoat-hearted God. ‘Wherefore didst thou beget me? I sought it not’ (X:762). The toxic tannins of Life pulsating the pain of survival through the sewers and culverts of a tainted system:
... O fleeting joyes
Of Paradise, deare bought with lasting woes!
Did I request thee, Maker, from my Clay
To mould me Man, did I sollicite thee
From darkness to promote me, or here place
In this delicious Garden? (X:741-746)
The helpless addict of a higher God will always adduce the wonder of the lowly flower as evidence of a marvellous uplifting Life but never the violated, starving child blinded by a worm burrowing through the blue innocence of the eyeball:
Thy terms too hard, by which I was to hold
The good I sought not. To the loss of that,
Sufficient penaltie, why hast thou added
The sense of endless woes? inexplicable
Thy justice seems (X:751-755)
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