Huddled in your castles like Prospero’s doomed revelers, sighing in the springtime of contagion, you evade and avoid the obvious. But the Muse has entered, unseen, and stands among you in her mask of elegiac splendor. She smiles as you mock her presence. She laughs quietly to herself as her influence wafts upon the very air, inspiring and infecting all concerned. You try to protect yourselves from the lyric epidemic, nonetheless her viral poetic molecules go forth, regroup, mutate, and attach themselves to the souls of her detractors. Her spores hang upon the very droplets of the mist, a suspended Parnassian miasma. The first tremors of poetic sickness begin to shudder deep within and among the most reluctant revelers. They try to dispel their fears; they brag and congratulate themselves, chattering about the uselessness of poetry, listing all they ways in which they have successfully barricaded themselves from her pestilential presence. But the Muse has entered and none can ensure her departure. Poetry will have her way and resistance is futile. Some will survive, but others will meet her as their avenging angel of the plague, and neither Egyptian magic nor sanitizing legerdemain shall deter the blossoming vector of her influence. Fear, oh unpoetic readers, this sudden lyrical acceleration, this verdant celebration:

               our poetic coronation.