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Monday
Imagine that you’ve just watched the military responding to a peaceful demonstration of 60,000 with murderous force, killing a dozen or more and wounding anywhere from 400-700. The crowd is demonstrating over high tariffs, which are pushing up the price of staples. And although the poor are struggling with cost of living, political Christians don’t appear to care.
The military, meanwhile, has the full support of both the government’s chief executive and the ruling party in the Senate. All the while, the executive head appears checked out, except for when it comes to leeching off the public purse.
In other words, Percy Shelley’s sonnet “England in 1819” could be describing America in 2025—and America as it may become given how Donald Trump has long fantasized about the American military shooting demonstrators in the legs.
Shelley’s actual targets are the mad King George III and his soon-to-be successor, Prince Regent George. In 1819, British cavalry charged Manchester demonstrators calling for universal male suffrage and an end to the Corn Laws, which maintained tariffs on cheap foreign grain imports. What landowners regarded as economic protection, however, led to scarcity, famine, and unemployment.
The Tory government’s response to the massacre was to pass “the Six Acts,” which “were aimed at suppressing any meetings for the purpose of radical reform” (Wikipedia).
Poetry Foundation’s Christopher Spaide describes the poem as “two breathless, run-on sentences, running on rage, racing through reasons to despair about “the actual state” of England before veering, determinedly, toward a cautious optimism.” The poem was too revolutionary to be published in 1819 but saw the light of day after Shelley died. Here it is:
England in 1819
By Percy Shelley
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,—
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, mud from a muddy spring,—
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,—
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—
An army which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,—
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless, a book sealed,—
A Senate—Time’s worst statute unrepealed,—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.
Since many of us are wondering what it will take to stop leech-like Donald Trump and Elon Musk—along with their Christless Christian supporters—from carrying out their own liberticide project, does the poem offer any hope? When Spaide says “cautious optimism,” he’s looking at the word “may.” It’s possible that the glorious phantom of liberty may arise from the graves of the political martyrs.
Shelley is right about one thing: the desire for liberty never goes away. Shelley’s once suppressed poem has become one of those enduring works that have inspired generations of patriots dedicated to freedom. We can continue to turn to it as resistance to Trumpism grows.
