Poetry makes the front page

[Red Clydesider]

Poetry doesn't often make the front pages. But this month there has been a powerful performance of Shelley's political poem 'The Masque of Anarchy' during the Manchester International Festival. The star is Maxine Peake, an actress already well known on British TV - and, like Shelley, a political radical.

The review in the Independent newspaper said 'it felt not like a performance so much as being present at a piece of history'. At the same time 'she was not recalling the past so much as speaking to a present in which her words would have echoed as aptly in Tahrir Square'.

Shelley's poem was written in anger after the 'Peterloo Massacre' in Manchester in 1819, in which a crowd of peaceful demonstrators - women and children as well as men - protesting against wage cuts in the cotton industry, were attacked by a troop of cavalry. 15 were killed and hundreds injured.

Maxine Peake has backed up her performance by giving interviews in which she has stressed the modern relevance of Shelley's poem, and slammed the current UK government for waging war on the lowest paid and most vulnerable.

So Shelley's poem is in the news and is being talked about.

More to follow, about Shelley, the poem, and Peterloo. And some ideas for continuing this thread.

James.

[Arlekino]

Thanks for sharing Shelley's poem. Great post thanks again.

[Red Clydesider]

Thanks, Rasyte. Here's more about Shelley's poem. The Mask (or Masque) is a surreal parade of politicians of the day.

I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh...

Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, and he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.

And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.

The parade goes on, with more caricatured politicians plus bishops, peers and lawyers. Finally we meet 'a maniac maid' whose name is Hope. She speaks, at first despairingly, but growing in strength. She gives a neat summary of the plight of the working class:

What is Freedom? - ye can tell
That which slavery is, too well -
'Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day...

Hope ends with one of the greatest calls to the working class:

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.

Nothing to lose but their chains! (Marx was one year old when Shelley wrote this.)

Shelley was a revolutionary in terms of his own time. He believed in abolition of monarchy and peerage, republican government, universal franchise, and equality for women.

It has to be said that he did not advocate violent revolution, but non-violent resistance. One result of this is that he was often quoted by Gandhi.

Now: Shelley's not the only poet of the left. Give us some more! Quotes, interesting facts about the poet's life, why you think the poet is important. OK?

James.

[Red Clydesider]

I should maybe have explained that Eldon is the Earl of Eldon, Lord Chancellor 1807-27. He prosecuted English rebublicans, and sympathisers with the French Revolution, for high treason. Shelley's sketch of him is a brutal caricature but close enough to the truth and no more or less than Eldon deserved.

[blake 3:17]

It's a great poem.

A favourite of mine by Shelley is his poem To Wordsworth

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship, and love's first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty.
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou shouldst cease to be.

The politics aren't as clear in this age, but are pretty brutal. Wordsworth, who'd celebrated the French Revolution, had turned his back on any possibility of social change and become a government and Church hack.

[Red Clydesider]

This is a great poem too. It reads like an elegy, though Wordsworth outlived Shelley by many years. Shelley grieves for the 'death' of Wordsworth's youthful radicalism. I doubt that had Shelley lived longer he would have gone the way of Wordsworth; he was much too committed for that.

Another footnote to the Masque: the poem says Lord Eldon 'wept well', which is a reference to Eldon's habit as a judge of shedding tears as he sentenced petty criminals to transportation to New South Wales. Crocodile tears, I think we can safely say - hypocritical at least in the sense that Eldon never considered how grossly over-severe the penalties were for stealing some small item.

James.