rhymes
Explanation
This comic riffs on John Milton's "Paradise Lost" and the history of English poetry. The first panel notes that by the 16th edition, "Paradise Lost" had many complaints about the quality of its blank verse -- people felt poems should rhyme. The comic notes this is somewhat ironic because rhyming poetry was itself an "invention of a barbarous age" that set off established classical meter. The second panel shows someone having first read "Paradise Lost" as a teenager thinking it was merely "churchy Beowulf." Now as an adult, they realize it's actually about "your God" -- and someone responds "Darkness, right?" with the reply "darkness, yes!" The humor plays on how people's literary understanding deepens with age, and also pokes fun at the recurring debates about poetic form (rhyme vs. blank verse vs. classical meter) that have persisted for centuries, where every generation thinks the previous one's innovation was barbaric.