BW25: X is for Xanadu

Courtesy of ZedZap

Hello my darlins.  Happy Father's Day to all the dads.   I have fried my brain this week working on the last paper due for my humanities class.  Instead of a final we had to write a project paper and my subject was George Bernard Shaw.  Interesting, scary, dude.  I am now technically done with all my classes to earn my Bachelor of Science in Liberal Arts through Excelsior College.   Officially I have to wait for my advisor to review everything and send out my graduation application packet, which will take a couple months.   So, I will leave you with a poem to mull over and think about, while my brain recovers.

Xanadu - Kubla Khan

by 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me
That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

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BW24: W is for what shall we read next?

Despite all the books we have on our shelves, sometimes nothing sounds good.  And you sit there and stare at the pile, wondering what am I in the mood for? What should I read next? Well, I discovered through Jenners of Life With Books, (she's a hoot by the way, be sure to check her blog out) some widgets that will help you decide or pick something new to read.  Great when doing a theme based book challenge. 

Whichbook.net is an interesting search engine with 12 choices and their opposites from such as happy  or sad, beautiful or disgusting, easy or demanding, etc.  You get to make up to four choices, then press go and see what books come up.   I recently discovered through this process a really interesting book called Salamander by Thomas Wharton.  It's on my shelves waiting to be read.  You can also come up with some rather interesting finds and unusual names.   

Picking 'happy', 'larger than life', 'optimistic', and 'short', the first thing that came up was "The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter and Jam" by Lauren Liendenberg.   Stop. I know what you're thinking but nope.  There isn't anything hinky about it. I looked it up and sounds rather interesting.   You can get lost for a while, plugging in various choices and seeing what the engine comes up with.   A fun diversion and who knows, you may just discover a new author or interesting book.

Other interesting book search engines:

The Book Seer

What Should I Read Next

Library Things Zeitgeist

Or pick a book randomly using Random.org and New York Times Best Seller Listing.  Plug in 1950 to 2011 into the Random generator, then go to the New York Times list, pick the year, then your birth month and see what comes up. 

Have fun! 

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BW 23: V is for Virginia

Virginia Woolf

I found this essay by Virginia Woolf on the love of reading. It speaks for itself and gives us plenty to think about our reading journeys.

 The Love of Reading

by 

Virginia Woolf

At this late hour of the world's history books are to be found in every room of the house - in the nursery, in the drawing room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. And in some houses they have collected so that they have to be accommodated with a room of their own. Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, valuable books in leather, cheap books in paper - one stops sometimes before them and asks in a transient amazement what is the pleasure I get, or the good I create, from passing my eyes up and down these innumerable lines of print? Reading is a very complex art - the hastiest examination of our sensations as a reader will show us that much. And our duties as readers are many and various. But perhaps it may be said that our first duty to a book is that one should read it for the first time as if one were writing it. 

One should begin by sitting in the dock with the criminal, not by mounting the bench to sit among the Judges. One should be an accomplice with the writer in his act, whether good or bad, of creation. For each of these books, however it may differ in kind and quality, is an attempt to make something. And our first duty as readers is to try and understand what the writer is making from the first word with which he builds his first sentence to the last with which he ends his book. We must not impose our design upon him; we must not try to make him conform his will to ours. We must allow Defoe to be Defoe and Jane Austen to be Jane Austen as freely as we allow the tiger to have his fur and the tortoise to have his shell. And this is very difficult. For it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings Heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision.

The great writers thus often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Defoe to Jane Austen, from Hardy to Peacock, from Trollope to Meredith, from Richardson to Rudyard Kipling, is to be wrenched and distorted, to be thrown violently this way and that. And so, too, with the lesser writers. Each is singular; each has a view, a temperament, an experience of his own which may conflict with ours but must be allowed to express itself fully if we are to do him justice. And the writers who have most to give us often do most violence to our prejudices, particularly if they are our own contemporaries, so that we have need of all our imagination and understanding if we are to get the utmost that they can give us. But reading, as we have suggested, is a complex art. It does not merely consist in sympathising and understanding. It consists, too, in criticising and in judging. 

The reader must leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend; he must become the judge. And this second process, which we may call the process of after-reading, for it is often done without the book before us, yields an even more solid pleasure than that which we receive when we are actually turning the pages. During the actual reading new impressions are always cancelling or completing the old. Delight, anger, boredom, laughter succeed each other incessantly as we read. Judgment is suspended, for we cannot know what may come next. But now the book is completed. It has taken a definite shape. And the book as a whole is different from the book received currently in several different parts. It has a shape, it has a being. And this shape, this being, can be held in the mind and compared with the shapes the essays of other books and given its own size and smallness by comparison with theirs.

But if this process of judging and deciding is full of pleasure it is also full of difficulty. Not much help can be looked for from outside. Critics and criticism abound, but it does not help us greatly to read the views of another mind when our own is still hot from a book that we have just read. It is after one has made up one's own opinion that the opinions of others are most illuminating. It is when we can defend our own judgment that we get most from the judgment of the great critics - the Johnson's, the Dryden's and the Arnold's. 

To make up our own minds we can best help ourselves first by realizing the impression that the book has left as fully and sharply as possible, and then by comparing this impression with the impressions that we have formulated in the past. There they hang in the wardrobe of the mind - the shapes of the books we have read, like clothes that we have taken off and hung up to wait their season. Thus, if we have just read, say, Clarissa Harlowe for the first time we take it and let it show itself against the shape that remains in our minds after reading Anna Karenina. We place them side by side and at once the outlines of the two books are cut out against each other as the angle of a house (to change the figure) is cut out against the fullness of the harvest moon. 

We contrast Richardson's prominent qualities with Tolstoy's. We contrast his indirectness and verbosity with Tolstoy's brevity and directness. We ask ourselves why it is that each writer has chosen so different an angle of approach. We compare the emotion that we felt at different crises of their books. We speculate as to the difference between the 18th century in England and the 19th century in Russia - but there is no end to the questions that at once suggest themselves as we place the books together.

Thus by degrees, by asking questions and answering them, we find that we have decided that the book we have just read is of this kind or that, has this degree of merit or that, takes its station at this point or at that in the literature as a whole. And if we are good readers we thus judge not only the classics and the masterpieces of the dead, but we pay the living writers the compliment of comparing them as they should be compared with the pattern of the great books of the past.

Thus, then, when the moralists ask us what good we do by running our eyes over these many printed pages, we can reply that we are doing our part as readers to help masterpieces into the world. We are fulfilling our share of the creative task - we are stimulating, encouraging, rejecting, making our approval and disapproval felt; and are thus acting as a check and a spur upon the writer. That is one reason for reading books - we are helping to bring good books into the world and to make bad books impossible. But it is not the true reason. 

The true reason remains the inscrutable one - we get pleasure from reading. It is a complex pleasure and a difficult pleasure; it varies from age to age and from book to book. But that pleasure is enough. Indeed that pleasure is so great that one cannot doubt that without it the world would be a far different and a far inferior place from what it is. Reading has changed the world and continues to change it. 

When the day of judgment comes therefore and all secrets are laid bare, we shall not be surprised to learn that the reason why we have grown from apes to men, and left our caves and dropped our bows and arrows and sat round the fire and talked and given to the poor and helped the sick - the reason why we have made shelter and society out of the wastes of the desert and the tangle of the jungle is simply this - we have loved reading.

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BW22: U is for Unicorn Pegasus Kitten

Clash of the Geeks

Funny how life works out sometimes.  Friday night I was just about to go to bed, but before I did, checked my stat counter and found I had gotten an extreme number of hits in a couple hours for an old post I'd written back in 2010 about a painting created by Jeff Zugale for Wil Wheaton (remember Wesley of star trek fame) and John Scalzi and a fan fiction contest. Check it out here and watch their hilarious video. It'll give you some insight into their minds. Anyway, when one of my posts suddenly starts getting lots of hits, somebody's mentioned it somewhere. So I followed the various worm trails until I discovered that Wil had tweeted while doing storytime at the Phoenix Comicon being held this weekend in AZ:

@Wilw If you're in the theater for Story time, look up the Unicorn Pegasus Kitten painting now. It's important.

My post came up # 1 on the google search over Wil Wheaton or John Scalzi. Odd but true and I kind of got a kick out of that. What he should have said was look up www.unicornpegasuskitten.com while I give a reading out of the book. Well, I figured it was just the universe talking to me, because I was in the midst of brainstorming "U" ideas.

Honesty, I had totally forgotten about the painting and the book created as a result of the contest. The end result is Clash of the Geeks with offerings by Wil Wheaton, John Scalzi, Patrick Rothfuss, Catherynne Valente, Stephen Toulouse, Rachel Swirsky, Scott Mattes, Bernardette Durbin, and John Anealio. All the proceeds benefit the Lupus Foundation of America.

The book is available in ebook format on the Clash of the Geeks website for free with voluntary payments strongly encouraged which will go to the Lupus Foundation. Check it out and you are all on the honor system here. If you choose to download it, be sure to donate. I did. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

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BW 21: T is for Trevor

William Trevor
May 24, 1928

Today I'd like to introduce you to Irish author, William Trevor.   On May 24, he will be celebrating his 83rd birthday.   He was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland.  Coincidentally my great grandmother was from County Cork as well.   Hmm...  I wonder!   He graduated from Trinity College in Dublin with a degree in History, worked as a teacher and sculptor until becoming a full time writer in 1968.  He emigrated to England in 1954 and today resides in Devon, England. 

His first book, written in 1958 "A Standard of Behavior" met with little success, however after writing short stories, his next book "The Old Boys" won the 1964 Hawthornden Prize for Literature.  He has won a number of prizes over the years for his works including the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction, Whitbread Book of the Year, and Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2002 for "The Story of Lucy Gault."

Story of Lucy Gault

According to Maureen Corrigan of NPR in her article about "William Trevor: A Short Story Master's Life Work and his most recent volume of short stories called "Selected Stories, Trevor is

"a master of capturing those small shifts in consciousness that shatter someone's world. Because he's an Irishman living in exile (Trevor has lived most of his long life in England) and because so many of those aforementioned epiphanies take place oh-so-discreetly, the comparisons to James Joyce have been inevitable. But as the 48 recent stories in this volume attest, Trevor has a more developed taste for the macabre than Joyce ever did. It creeps up on a reader slowly: the awareness that so many of these tales are about being trapped, buried alive, thwarted at every turn of life's labyrinth. And, yet, the signature response of Trevor's characters to their bricked-in situation is a fatalistic shrug garnished with Black Irish humor."

Selected Stories

In an interview with Mira Stout of The Paris Review, Trevor says of his writing:

 "I think all writing is experimental. The very obvious sort of experimental writing is not really more experimental than that of a conventional writer like myself. I experiment all the time but the experiments are hidden. Rather like abstract art: You look at an abstract picture, and then you look at a close-up of a Renaissance painting and find the same abstractions."

In response to her question why he's never created a hero in any of his stories:

Because I find them dull. Heroes don’t really belong in short stories. As Frank O’Connor said, “Short stories are about little people,” and I agree. I find the unheroic side of people much richer and more entertaining than black-and-white success.

Read the whole interview here for more insight into William Trevor, his writing, Irish writers and heroes, politics and more. It's rather insightful.

For more information on William Trevor, his book list and a critical perspective, go here.

Happy Birthday, William Trevor


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BW20: S is for Stereotyping

Chimamanda Adichie

In my Humanities class this week, we are discussing world literature and stereotyping of different cultures One of the authors we talked about is Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie.  She gave a very interesting talk about "The Danger of the Single Story" and how the single story creates stereotypes.  I wanted to share it with you today.

Her talk is well worth listening too and also made me curious about her and her books which fit in well with our armchair traveling mini challenge.

Purple Hibiscus

Half of a Yellow Sun

The Thing Around Your Neck

She's an interesting woman and I look forward to reading her books and the start of my armchair traveling through the continent of Africa.  Speaking of which, how is your armchair traveling going?  Visited any where interesting lately?

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BW19: R is for Roxanne

Roxanne St. Claire

Hello my darlings!  I'm on vacation this week and have been reading the latest series by one of my favorite authors, Roxanne St. Claire, who wrote the romantic suspense series "The Bullet Catchers."  Her latest series is "the Guardian Angelinos."

"The Guardian Angelinos are a Boston-based family that flies under the radar of the law to  solve crimes, save lives, protect the innocent, and take down the guilty. This team of rule-breaking, risk-taking, wave-making siblings and cousins aren’t afraid to get into the face of criminals as one of the toughest, grittiest security and PI firms around. This close-knit clan of protection, investigation, law enforcement, technology, weaponry, and legal experts all have one simple creed:  The good guys win and the bad guys get the holy hell kicked out of them."

I'm loving the characters in these stories just as much as I adored the tough bullet catchers in her other series.

She's a multifaceted writer with great imagination and very interesting characters.  Check out her booklist here.  A free prequel is available for Edge of Sight which tells the history of Sam and Zach's story in Taken to the Edge.


I hope each and every one of you have a Happy Mother's Day.  My mother's day present this year. Getting to spend it with my mom who we almost lost to a stroke a few months ago.  She is recovering and I'm so thankful I get to share the day with her.  So hug your mom close today and tell her how much you appreciate her, because you'll never know when she could be taken from you. 

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BW18: Q is for Queen

Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Royal Marriage

All eyes were on England Friday for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.  One of the first questions my hubby asked:  What is their last name?  Good question.  I always thought since it was called Windsor Castle, their last name was Windsor.  I was half right.  On the official website of The British Monarchy (fascinating website - check it out)  I discovered this:

The Royal Family name of Windsor was confirmed by The Queen after her accession in 1952. However, in 1960, The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh decided that they would like their own direct descendants to be distinguished from the rest of the Royal Family (without changing the name of the Royal House), as Windsor is the surname used by all the male and unmarried female descendants of George V.

It was therefore declared in the Privy Council that The Queen's descendants, other than those with the style of Royal Highness and the title of Prince/Princess, or female descendants who marry, would carry the name of Mountbatten-Windsor.

This reflected Prince Philip's surname. In 1947, when Prince Philip of Greece became naturalised, he assumed the name of Philip Mountbatten as a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy.

The effect of the declaration was that all The Queen's children, on occasions when they needed a surname, would have the surname Mountbatten-Windsor.

And with the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton, the queen has announced:

The Queen has today been pleased to confer a Dukedom on Prince William of Wales. His titles will be Duke of Cambridge, Earl of Strathearn and Baron Carrickfergus.

Prince William thus becomes His Royal Highness The Duke of Cambridge and Miss Catherine Middleton on marriage will become Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cambridge.

William and Kate: A Royal Love Story

Congratulations to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. May their marriage be as blessed as his grandparents.

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BW17: P is for Poetic Prophecy

Courtesy Jeff Golden

Happy Easter!  National Poetry Month is coming to a close and what better way to send it out than with this:

The Nail

by

Laurene H. Bell

The nail is used for many things,

A useful securing tool;

A hammer is taken by the hand

And drives it, that's the rule.

A nail is needed when you build,

It's a necessary thing.

It was also used over two thousand years ago

To hang upon a tree, the King.

He took the pain and suffering

For all mankind, you see.

Yet He took the torture just for you,

And He took it just for me.

You cannot keep a good man down,

Through the years many have said.

He went down a man, and rose a King

To deliver the spiritually dead.

He is on the throne

At God's right hand.

The First, the Last,

The Great I Am.

No nail, no hammer can touch Him now--

The mighty King on high.

What He built is forevermore,

Salvation for you and I.

So when you see a simple nail with it's sharpened end,

And need to build or repair,

Lift up your eyes, your heart and mind

And thank Him with a prayer.


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BW16: O is for Owl

Painting by Donna L. Derstine

Forgive me, but I'm madly working on finishing a paper for my humanities class so keeping it short and sweet this week.   Did you ever have a nursery rhyme get stuck in your head, but then couldn't remember the whole thing.  Has happened many a time to me, particularly with this one. It was published in 1871.   Enjoy!

The Owl and the Pussycat

By

Edward Lear

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,

And sang to a small guitar,

"O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are, you are, you are,

What a beautiful Pussy you are."

Pussy said to the Owl "You elegant fowl,

How charmingly sweet you sing.

O let us be married, too long we have tarried;

But what shall we do for a ring?"

They sailed away, for a year and a day,

To the land where the Bong-tree grows,

And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

With a ring at the end of his nose, his nose, his nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling your ring?"

Said the Piggy, "I will"

So they took it away, and were married next day

By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon.

And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand.

They danced by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

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BW15: N is for Nature

National Geographic: Bamboo Forest, Japan

As I mentioned last week, April is National Poetry Month so I'm going to continue with the poetry theme this week.  I was never a huge fan of poetry growing up and I know the reason why.  When I learned about it in high school and college, it seemed complicated. I really didn't understand the art form and it was just something to memorize, analyze and get through. Instead of appreciating the words, we'd get lost in the verbage - Iambic, anapest, pentameters, blah, blah, blah.   I wasn't taught to appreciate it, because the ones teaching it, didn't seem to appreciate it either.  If you want someone to get excited about something, you have to be excited about it yourself.   I was just reading in A Thomas Jefferson Education that you can have the greatest teacher in the world, but if the student doesn't care about what their teaching, the lesson is lost. And if the teacher doesn't care, well....    In one ear and out the other. 

With age comes wisdom and with wisdom comes appreciation.  I've come to appreciate the art form, love Haiku, love the poets who think out of the box and break the rules.   I was listening to NPR the other day and they were interviewing Billy Collins whom I have never heard of.  He intrigued me so I looked him up on the internet and read a few of his poems.  He's one of those who thinks outside the box.  I spotlighted one of his poems on My Two Blessings.

Inspiration for poetry comes from all forms but it think the main inspiration is nature.  Nature is beautiful, emotional, awe inspiring.   My mouth literally drops open when I see some of the shots National Geographic photographer have taken, whether watching documentaries on the television or wandering about their website.    Makes me want to write a poem myself.   There are many different forms including:  Ballade, blues, cento, cinquain, elegy, epic, haiku, prose and sonnets just to name a few.   Have you ever tried to write a Haiku. Some of the greatest traditional haiku poets are Basho, Yosa Buson, Kobayashi Issa, and Masaoka Shiki.  I learned about Basho when doing Five in a Row with James. Grass Sandals: The Travels of Basho was one of the books we rowed and I fell in love with the Haiku. 

The first day of the year:

thoughts come - and there is loneliness;

the autumn dusk is here.

                           --    Basho

A haiku is made up of simple words and grammar about nature, feelings, experiences and consists only of 17 syllables.  The first line 5 syllables, the 2nd line 7 syllables and the 3rd line 5 syllables.  It doesn't rhyme but paints a picture in your head.  I have a challenge for you this week, besides reading poetry and that is to write a poem in any form including a haiku.  Post it on your blog or post it in the comments, but I dare you to try and see what you can come up with.  I  flexed my writing wings a bit and attempted a poem and a haiku from that poem.  Here's my attempt. 

Poem by Robin of My Two Blessings

Unity

We are the branches.

He is the tree.

Stately, strong

All in unity.

One without the other

like dead branches fall

together, three in unity.

Roots stretch deep,

Anchored to the ground.

Branches reach high,

Seek the sky.

There are no bounds.

Flowers bud.

Fragile, but strong.

Green vine cling

tenacious and long.

Deep brown limbs

lift to the sky.

We are the branches.

He is the tree.

Stately, strong

All in unity.

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Haiku

Green vines, cling and twine
deep brown limbs stretch to the sky

fragile flowers bud.

Your turn!

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BW14: M is for Milton

April is National Poetry month so what better way to celebrate poetry than with John Milton.  In our Well Educated Mind quest, poetry is one of the categories.  Most of the poets on the list may be found online. There are numerous site where you may read Paradise Lost or even download it to your e-reader from Project Gutenberg.  

Paradiselost.org is full of information about Milton, his life and his works. Darkness Visible, hosted by Christ's College at Cambridge University, has everything you need to know about Milton and Paradise Lost including plot summary of each of the books, history of the illustrations, Milton's life, religion and politics and his influence on later writers.   It is a wonderful, interesting, educational site for studying Paradise Lost.  You'll get lost for a few hours, in a good way. Believe me! 

The beginning of book 1

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse, that, on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God, I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly thou, O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples th' upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou from the first
Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,
Dove-like sat'st brooding on the vast Abyss,
And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support;
That, to the height of this great argument,
I may assert Eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.

Say first--for Heaven hides nothing from thy view,
Nor the deep tract of Hell--say first what cause
Moved our grand parents, in that happy state,
Favoured of Heaven so highly, to fall off
From their Creator, and transgress his will
For one restraint, lords of the World besides.
Who first seduced them to that foul revolt?
Th' infernal Serpent; he it was whose guile,
Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The mother of mankind, what time his pride
Had cast him out from Heaven, with all his host
Of rebel Angels, by whose aid, aspiring
To set himself in glory above his peers,
He trusted to have equalled the Most High,
If he opposed, and with ambitious aim
Against the throne and monarchy of God,
Raised impious war in Heaven and battle proud,
With vain attempt. Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th' ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th' Omnipotent to arms.

Continue it here, here, or here.

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