News at Eleven (Back Page): The coarse, and frankly misogynistic verse

likens a young woman to a faggot, a bunch of damp sticks, which, when cast upon the fire, produces moisture "at both ends", like (according to the poem) a weeping virgin when sexually aroused. By contrast, the more sexually experienced woman is more like dry wood, which becomes joyfully enflamed when put on the fire.

It is all rather a long way from the lofty, Christian sentiments of Milton's great epic, Paradise Lost.

However, Batt's operative word is "if". According to Dr Abigail Williams, who is leading a project at Oxford to digitise the major collection of 18th-century poetic "miscellanies" in which Batt found the "Milton" rhyme, "You could become very rich and famous--well, famous, anyway--if you could prove the rhyme was really by Milton. I am pretty certain it is not."

from The Guardian: Did John Milton write filthy, innuendo-laden rhyme?
then The Guardian: Bawdy glee

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