Poem Of The Week: England In 1819 By Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

England in 1819

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Plus ça change. The full weight of Shelley’s Republican ire is brought to bear on the machinery of the state, its limitless greed, its laissez-faire inertia and its brutalities in ‘England in 1819’. That the broken realm over which the porphyria-ridden George III presides is animated to bloody apoplexy when provoked, like a lion prodded with a sharp stick, is a measure of its unforgiving indifference to grievous inequality. Conceived in the wake of Peterloo and the Corn Laws, Shelley’s sonorous bells echo in relentless alliterative strikes, tolling the clauses of iniquity in two titanic sentences.

But nothing ages so well as injustice, and Shelley’s extraordinarily composite sonnet, whose rhyme scheme cross-stitches Petrarchan and English forms, speaks to us, if not directly, then to our post-industrial landscape of Ruritanian rituals, strange feudal fealties and foodbanks. Nailing wrongs like grievances to a billboard, the poet’s inventory condemns a complicity of clergy, monarchy and political establishment within its exquisitely worked compass.

Shelley’s litany is open-eyed and unremitting. Though not named, the 1819 massacre is present by inference: ‘A people starved and stabbed in th’untilled field’ are the dead walking, condemned even before the sabres begin to flash. As inert as those ‘leechlike’ figures who feed on their labours, and who bloat and ‘drop, blind in blood’, they are deprived of purpose.

The closing note of hope is counter-intuitive in a poem of despair tempered by anger, and yet it is fitting that the ‘Phantom’ should emerge from the remains of the dead, upon whose bones memory is hallowed.

‘England in 1819’ is taken from The New Oxford Book of English Verse (1972), published by Oxford University Press.