I love his Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen, in part:
Many ingenious lovely things are gone That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude, protected from the circle of the moon That pitches common things about. There stood Amid the ornamental bronze and stone An ancient image made of olive wood - And gone are phidias' famous ivories And all the golden grasshoppers and bees.
We too had many pretty toys when young: A law indifferent to blame or praise, To bribe or threat; habits that made old wrong Melt down, as it were wax in the sun's rays; Public opinion ripening for so long We thought it would outlive all future days. O what fine thought we had because we thought That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.
All teeth were drawn, all ancient tricks unlearned, And a great army but a showy thing; What matter that no cannon had been turned Into a ploughshare? Parliament and king Thought that unless a little powder burned The trumpeters might burst with trumpeting And yet it lack all glory; and perchance The guardsmen's drowsy chargers would not prance.
Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free; The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.
*****
Grim stuff, true, But as apt today as it was then, don't you think?
--- On Wed, 1/14/09, Matthias Wasser <matthias.wasser at gmail.com> wrote:
> From: Matthias Wasser <matthias.wasser at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] The reds buy Shelley (Was Re: How Politics Ruined My Life:
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Wednesday, January 14, 2009, 8:53 PM
> For what it's worth, here's one of my (I'm sure
> many's) favorite
> right-wing poems:
>
> Turning and turning in the widening gyre
> The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
> Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
> Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
> The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
> The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
> The best lack all conviction, while the worst
> Are full of passionate intensity.
>
> Surely some revelation is at hand;
> Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
> The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
> When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
> Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
> A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
> A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
> Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
> Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
> The darkness drops again; but now I know
> That twenty centuries of stony sleep
> Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
> And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
> Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
>
> I think it's worth noting that this poem isn't
> beautiful in _spite_ of
> being right-wing (or at least anti-utopian and
> conservative); it
> succeeds because it expresses that viewpoint so well.
> It's not like
> it's formally interesting or anything.
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