[Milton-L] A Sonnet for Mr. Milton

[Kemmer Anderson]

        Happy Birthday, John Milton, Englishman

Milton's eyes marched across Homer's Greek verse
With the form of epic shaping his mind
And language into the scenes he might find
Grafted to Athena's tree a diverse
Fruit with olive shine fated to reverse
The course through Virgil's poetics to bind
His sentence to Eden's tree and the kind
Of words that grow disputes when we converse
With knowledge of good and evil on our tongue.

Ode to be apple in the hand of Eve
And know by that Delphic oracle
The dichotomy of nature's sound sung
By the rebel whose prose made us believe
New truth: speech fell and grew rhetorical.

                                                 Kemmer Anderson