A poem commemorating the death of radical poet Percy Bysshe Shelley on 8th July 1822
ls’t not enough that splendour’s useless glare,
Real grandeur’s bane, must mock the poor man’s stare;
…
No trophied bust need tell thy sainted name,
No herald blazon to the world thy fame,
Nor scrolls essay an endless meed to give;
In grateful memory still thy deeds must live.
No sculptured marble shall be raised to thee,
The hearts of England will thy memoirs be.
—Shelley, ‘Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things’, 1811
by Alan Morrison
Two centuries have passed since my blue imago
Washed ashore at Viareggio, unrecognisable
But for the soaked attire clung like seaweed to my skin,
& a pocketful of Keats in warped buckram sleeves—
A porcelain doll laid on a pyre: my mortal coil
Blown to smoking bloom… Now my sea-bleached eyes
Reopen to behold an England strangely changed
But still recognisable as the Albion I inhabited:
A Babel of hubris & avarice, where property is
Worshipped, & trumpeting metal carriages trump
Pedestrians in hierarchies, & greed’s esteemed,
Engine of acquisitive drives to buy up & let
To tenants made human-chattels by parasitic rents
That settle rentiers’ mortgages, diviners of passive
Incomes, grubbing demiurges of grouting & gratis
Whose scrolling cry is ‘No DSS’—blighted indigents
Tagged as ‘scroungers’ by landlords of indolence;
& out on the pavements Street Arabs, degraded, beg;
Others pitch tents in parks; or haunt empty banks
Where Charity is meted out in tins; yet grandeur
Reigns in gentrified districts of ill-gotten gains—
The gap between rich & poor, Regency-grotesque—
The culprit? Cupidity, & its spoon-fed fable:
The poor are morally irresponsible—so say
Paragons of Arrogance & arrogated Grace,
Trophied Pharaohs of Capital in marble pyramids;
& reigning over all still is Monarchy, rancid antique,
Its hallmark a Crown of Anarchy masking a paradox:
Citizens bound as Subjects; & suffrage distributes
Disproportionate fruits—Eton & Oxford, pillars
Of power: pelf & nepotism palm the pocket borough—
O Peterloo! O postponed Republic! England has
Re-rigged the hedges of privilege Lilburne’s
Levellers & Winstanley’s Diggers tried to consign
To historical straw way back in 1649;
O how modern Sherwood howls for Robin Hood,
Epping pines for Turpin—we’ve reverted to slavish
Bondage, deference & serfdom, gamed by badinage
Of blue-blood Barons who pretend to represent
The common people, whip up apoplectic spit
& venom among Englishmen—crimsoned Gammon—
Against foreigners & refugees; & England
Is parched to sun-blanched pastures—no therapies
Can repair premature ripening of blackberries—
Petrol, ubiquitous poison, begrimes the planet,
Taints the air, & magnifies the sun’s glare; England
Stands against its better sense, casts itself adrift
From the Continent where I hug my Roman grave,
Haunt the distance in time & space of Italian
Pastoral far from Warnham’s chalk-scraped dream
Of old Roman roads’ long-overgrown green.
This poem previously appeared in Poems for the Shelley Memorial Poetry Prize 2022—An Anthology (Shelley Memorial Trust, 2022),
and Wolves Come Grovelling (Culture Matters, 2023).
