Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
- Introduction
- 1 The Chartist imaginary: ‘talking by turns of politics and poetry’
- 2 Chartist poetry and literary history
- 3 ‘A jackass load of poetry’: the Northern Star's poetry column 1838–1852
- 4 Insurrectionary sonnets: the ideological afterlife of the Newport uprising
- 5 ‘Merry England’: memory and nostalgia in the year of the mass strike
- 6 ‘The future-hastening storm’: Chartist poetry in 1848
- 7 Constellating Chartist poetry: Gerald Massey, Walter Benjamin and the uses of messianism
- Appendix A Three Chartist poems
- Appendix B Details of poetry published in the poetry column of the Northern Star
- Bibliography
- Index
Appendix A - Three Chartist poems
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE AND CULTURE
- Introduction
- 1 The Chartist imaginary: ‘talking by turns of politics and poetry’
- 2 Chartist poetry and literary history
- 3 ‘A jackass load of poetry’: the Northern Star's poetry column 1838–1852
- 4 Insurrectionary sonnets: the ideological afterlife of the Newport uprising
- 5 ‘Merry England’: memory and nostalgia in the year of the mass strike
- 6 ‘The future-hastening storm’: Chartist poetry in 1848
- 7 Constellating Chartist poetry: Gerald Massey, Walter Benjamin and the uses of messianism
- Appendix A Three Chartist poems
- Appendix B Details of poetry published in the poetry column of the Northern Star
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
CHARLES DAVLIN, ‘ON A CLIFF WHICH O'ERHUNG’
(NORTHERN STAR, 5 OCTOBER 1839, 7)On a cliff which o'erhung the huge billows that hove
Their white foam, to the war waging skies;
Sat Britannia consulting the daughter of Jove,
Rebel faction, how best to chastise.
When Minerva, soft tuned as the lute on the gale,
Said the gods had decreed hence that justice prevail,
That the millions, whose pacific arguments fall,
Shall for death or for liberty rise.
Whilst contemn'd and despised are the lion and crest,
Shall the late laurell'd Queen of the waves
Boast her millions so long, so exclusively blessed,
So remote from the bondage of slaves?
Shall her time-serving tools still continue to sing,
Of her famed Constitution, Lords, Commons, and King,
While a Church and Statemongrel, hermaphrodite thing,
That loud long-boasted, lion outbraves?
Shall hoarse Neptune's proud daughter, whose menace was fate,
Deign to plead, but with scorn to be heard,
And her famed royal brute, by mere monkeys of state,
Be audaciously pluck'd by the beard?
Ere that the lion should long thus in torpitude sleep,
Or thyself thus degraded, degenerate weep,
Be thy last crumbling atoms dispers'd through the deep,
Nor the tomb of thy mem'ry be rear'd.
That fell hydra, which preys on thy heart's inmost core,
Still around thee whose coils vilely hang
That political tape-worm, from darkness of yore
And the law primogeniture sprang.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Poetry of ChartismAesthetics, Politics, History, pp. 225 - 229Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009