Their penance, laden with fair fruit, like that

Which grew in Paradise, the bait of Eve

Used by the Tempter: on that prospect strange

Their earnest eyes they fixed, imagining

For one forbidden tree a multitude

Now risen, to work them further woe or shame;

Yet, parched with scalding thirst and hunger fierce,

Though to delude them sent, could not abstain;

But on they rolled in heaps, and, up the trees

Climbing, sat thicker than the snaky locks

That curled Megaera: greedily they plucked

The fruitage fair to sight, like that which grew

Near that bituminous lake where Sodom flamed;

This more delusive, not the touch, but taste

Deceived; they, fondly thinking to allay

Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit

Chewed bitter ashes, which the offended taste

With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayed,

Hunger and thirst constraining; drugged as oft,

With hatefullest disrelish writhed their jaws,

With soot and cinders filled; so oft they fell

Into the same illusion, not as Man

Whom they triumphed once lapsed. Thus were they plagued

And worn with famine, long and ceaseless hiss,

Till their lost shape, permitted, they resumed;

Yearly enjoined, some say, to undergo,

This annual humbling certain numbered days,

To dash their pride, and joy, for Man seduced.

However, some tradition they dispersed

Among the Heathen, of their purchase got,

And fabled how the Serpent, whom they called

Ophion, with Eurynome, the wide—

Encroaching Eve perhaps, had first the rule

Of high Olympus; thence by Saturn driven

And Ops, ere yet Dictaean Jove was born.

Meanwhile in Paradise the hellish pair

Too soon arrived; Sin, there in power before,

Once actual; now in body, and to dwell

Habitual habitant; behind her Death,

Close following pace for pace, not mounted yet

On his pale horse: to whom Sin thus began.

“Second of Satan sprung, all-conquering Death!

What thinkest thou of our empire now, though earned

With travel difficult, not better far

Than still at Hell’s dark threshold to have sat watch,

Unnamed, undreaded, and thyself half starved?”

Whom thus the Sin-born monster answered soon.

“To me, who with eternal famine pine,

Alike is Hell, or Paradise, or Heaven;

There best, where most with ravine I may meet;

Which here, though plenteous, all too little seems

To stuff this maw, this vast unhide-bound corpse.”

To whom the incestuous mother thus replied.

“Thou therefore on these herbs, and fruits, and flowers,

Feed first; on each beast next, and fish, and fowl;

No homely morsels! and, whatever thing

The sithe of Time mows down, devour unspared;

Till I, in Man residing, through the race,

His thoughts, his looks, words, actions, all infect;

And season him thy last and sweetest prey.”

This said, they both betook them several ways,

Both to destroy, or unimmortal make

All kinds, and for destruction to mature

Sooner or later; which the Almighty seeing,

From his transcendent seat the Saints among,

To those bright Orders uttered thus his voice.

“See, with what heat these dogs of Hell advance