greykit.poetry — #liberty
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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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1821
[lord-byron]
The Isles of Greece
A poem-within-a-poem sung by the anachronistic bard at Lambro's island feast — sixteen stanzas lamenting the fallen glory of Greece, invoking Marathon, Salamis, and Thermopylae, and urging the living not to drown their shame in Samian wine but to reclaim their inheritance.