We never saw you, like our sires,For whom your face was Freedom’s face,Nor know what office-tapes and wiresWith such strong cords may interlace;We know not if the statesmen thenWere fashioned as the sort we see,We know that not under your kenDid England laugh at Liberty. Yea, this one thing is known of you,We know that […]

A sleepy people, without priests or kings,Dreamed here, men say, to drive us to the sea:O let us drive ourselves! For it is freeAnd smells of honour and of English things.How came we brawling by these bitter springs,We of the North?–two kindly nations–we?Though the dice rattles and the clear coin rings,Here is no place for […]

ON HEARING A LANDLORD ACCUSED (FALSELY, FORALL THE BARD CAN SAY) OF NEGLECTING ONE OF THENUMEROUS WHITE HORSES THAT WERE OR WERE NOTCONNECTED WITH ALFRED THE GREAT If you have picked your lawn of leaves and snails,If you have told your valet, even with oaths,Once a week or so, to brush your clothes.If you have […]

The line breaks and the guns go under,The lords and the lackeys ride the plain;I draw deep breaths of the dawn and thunder,And the whole of my heart grows young again.For our Chiefs said “Done,” and I did not deem it;Our Seers said “Peace,” and it was not peace;Earth will grow worse till men redeem […]

The wind blew out from Bergen from the dawning to the day,There was a wreck of trees and fall of towers a score of miles away,And drifted like a livid leaf I go before its tide,Spewed out of house and stable, beggared of flag and bride.The heavens are bowed about my head, shouting like seraph […]

To J.S.M. EXTRACT FROM A ROMANCE WHICH IS NOT YETWRITTEN AND PROBABLY NEVER WILL BE. The wine they drink in ParadiseThey make in Haute Lorraine;God brought it burning from the sodTo be a sign and signal rodThat they that drink the blood of GodShall never thirst again. The wine they praise in ParadiseThey make in […]

When I came back to Fleet Street,Through a sunset nook at night,And saw the old Green DragonWith the windows all alight,And hailed the old Green DragonAnd the Cock I used to know,Where all good fellows were my friendsA little while ago; I had been long in meadows,And the trees took hold of me,And the still […]

When Adam went from ParadiseHe saw the Sword and ran;The dreadful shape, the new device,The pointed end of Paradise,And saw what Peril is and Price,And knew he was a man. When Adam went from Paradise,He turned him back and criedFor a little flower from Paradise;There came no flower from Paradise;The woods were dark in Paradise,And […]

The old earth keepeth her watch the same.Alone in a voiceless void doth stand,Her orange flowers in her bosom flame,Her gold ring in her hand.The surfs of the long gold-crested mornsBreak ever more at her great robe’s hem,And evermore come the bleak moon-horns.But she keepeth not watch for them. She keepeth her watch through the […]

“The Rev. Isaiah Bunter has disappeared into the interiorof the Solomon Islands, and it is feared that he may havebeen devoured by the natives, as there has been a considerablerevival of religious customs among the Polynesians.”A real paragraph from a real Paper; only the names altered. It was Isaiah BunterWho sailed to the world’s end,And […]

Happy, who like Ulysses or that lordWho raped the fleece, returning full and sage,With usage and the world’s wide reason stored,With his own kin can wait the end of age.When shall I see, when shall I see, God knows!My little village smoke; or pass the door,The old dear door of that unhappy houseThat is to […]

O well for him that loves the sunThat sees the heaven-race ridden or run,The splashing seas of sunset won,And shouts for victory. God made the sun to crown his head,And when death’s dart at last is sped,At least it will not find him dead,And pass the carrion by. O ill for him that loves the […]

The sky is blue with summer and the sun,The woods are brown as autumn with the tan,It might as well be Tropics and be done,I might as well be born a copper Khan;I fashion me an oriental fanMade of the wholly unreceipted billsBrought by the ice-man, sleeping in his van(A storm is coming on the […]

The gallows in my garden, people say,Is new and neat and adequately tall.I tie the noose on in a knowing wayAs one that knots his necktie for a ball;But just as all the neighbours–on the wall–Are drawing a long breath to shout “Hurray!”The strangest whim has seized me…. After allI think I will not hang […]

The amazing decision of the Government to employ methods quite alien to England, and rather belonging to the police of the Continent, probably arises from the appearance of papers which are lucid and fighting, like the papers of the Continent. The business may be put in many ways. But one way of putting it is […]

Everyone but a consistent and contented capitalist, who must be something pretty near to a Satanist, must rejoice at the spirit and success of the Battle of the Buses. But one thing about it which happens to please me particularly was that it was fought, in one aspect at least, on a point such as […]

A thing which does not exist and which is very much wanted is “A Working-Man’s History of England.” I do not mean a history written for working men (there are whole dustbins of them), I mean a history, written by working men or from the working men’s standpoint. I wish five generations of a fisher’s […]

It will be long before the poison of the Party System is worked out of the body politic. Some of its most indirect effects are the most dangerous. One that is very dangerous just now is this: that for most Englishmen the Party System falsifies history, and especially the history of revolutions. It falsifies history […]

There is a certain daily paper in England towards which I feel very much as Tom Pinch felt towards Mr. Pecksniff immediately after he had found him out. The war upon Dickens was part of the general war on all democrats, about the eighties and nineties, which ushered in the brazen plutocracy of to-day. And […]

Why is the modern party political journalism so bad? It is worse even than it intends to be. It praises its preposterous party leaders through thick and thin; but it somehow succeeds in making them look greater fools than they are. This clumsiness clings even to the photographs of public men, as they are snapshotted […]