by Ciaran O’Rourke
after Friedrich Engels, 1820-1895
A two-hundred-thousand mass – and what a mass!
Bare women, ruddy men, with nothing left, completely
clad in rags: living proletarians,
and more – of Ireland, each and all, feral,
fierce, fanatic Gaels… give me
two hundred thousand of such stock
and we could overthrow the monarchy tomorrow!
Hunger drives them here, to ice-cold,
mechanised, fair England’s halls:
in the brutal hurly-burly of the factories
their restiveness takes root: they squander
what they earn, then starve until
the next pay-day, on less and less, too much
accustomed (never reconciled)
to the pang between their ribs. All this
brings out the wayward contradictions
of the age, and in their nature: dissonant
and dumb, low-simmering in rage, they lash back
blindly at the great metropolis, the savageries
they bear, thirsting always for revenge –
these poorest of the poor, slum-
wracked and huddled with the dregs.
At home, meanwhile, among
the waste, abandoned fields, the ruins
grow like weeds: medieval churches,
ancient megaliths, and farther west,
the stony huts of peasants rotting in the rain,
famine shaking like a palsy
across the stunted hills. Beyond
these shrunken villages, long avenues of loss,
a splendid greenery survives – on lawns
the leisured landlords keep in fine repair.
We find, in this, a demonic iteration
of imperial excess! But the rising,
beggared people see it plain: a plunder-
loving caste and nation, built
on human dispossession – forging its own chains.
