greykit.poetry — #england
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1910
[rudyard-kipling]
The Way Through the Woods
A road the forest swallowed — and the ghosts you can almost hear still riding it.
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1902
[rudyard-kipling]
Sussex
A lover’s map of the South Downs — “Yea, Sussex by the sea!”
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1902
[rudyard-kipling]
The Islanders
A savage rebuke to a complacent England — “the flannelled fools at the wicket … the muddied oafs at the goals.”
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1845
[robert-browning]
Home-Thoughts, from Abroad
An exile's longing for an English April — the elm-tree bole in tiny leaf, the chaffinch on the orchard bough, the wise thrush singing each song twice over, the first fine careless rapture.
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1832
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
The Masque of Anarchy
Written in response to the Peterloo Massacre (1819), in which cavalry charged a crowd of 60,000 reformers in Manchester — Shelley's furious call for non-violent resistance, cataloguing the allegorical figures of Murder, Fraud, and Hypocrisy and ending with the clarion "Rise like Lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number.
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1804
[william-blake]
And did those feet in ancient time
Blake's visionary preface-poem to Milton — a defiant call to rebuild Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land through mental fight.