Written by
John Davidson |
In anguish we uplift
A new unhallowed song:
The race is to the swift;
The battle to the strong.
Of old it was ordained
That we, in packs like curs,
Some thirty million trained
And licensed murderers,
In crime should live and act,
If cunning folk say sooth
Who flay the naked fact
And carve the heart of truth.
The rulers cry aloud,
"We cannot cancel war,
The end and bloody shroud
Of wrongs the worst abhor,
And order's swaddling band:
Know that relentless strife
Remains by sea and land
The holiest law of life.
From fear in every guise,
From sloth, from lust of pelf,
By war's great sacrifice
The world redeems itself.
War is the source, the theme
Of art; the goal, the bent
And brilliant academe
Of noble sentiment;
The augury, the dawn
Of golden times of grace;
The true catholicon,
And blood-bath of the race."
We thirty million trained
And licensed murderers,
Like zanies rigged, and chained
By drill and scourge and curse
In shackles of despair
We know not how to break --
What do we victims care
For art, what interest take
In things unseen, unheard?
Some diplomat no doubt
Will launch a heedless word,
And lurking war leap out!
We spell-bound armies then,
Huge brutes in dumb distress,
Machines compact of men
Who once had consciences,
Must trample harvests down --
Vineyard, and corn and oil;
Dismantle town by town,
Hamlet and homestead spoil
On each appointed path,
Till lust of havoc light
A blood-red blaze of wrath
In every frenzied sight.
In many a mountain pass,
Or meadow green and fresh,
Mass shall encounter mass
Of shuddering human flesh;
Opposing ordnance roar
Across the swaths of slain,
And blood in torrents pour
In vain -- always in vain,
For war breeds war again!
The shameful dream is past,
The subtle maze untrod:
We recognise at last
That war is not of God.
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Written by
Oscar Wilde |
(To Sarah Bernhardt)
How vain and dull this common world must seem
To such a One as thou, who should'st have talked
At Florence with Mirandola, or walked
Through the cool olives of the Academe:
Thou should'st have gathered reeds from a green stream
For Goat-foot Pan's shrill piping, and have played
With the white girls in that Phaeacian glade
Where grave Odysseus wakened from his dream.
Ah! surely once some urn of Attic clay
Held thy wan dust, and thou hast come again
Back to this common world so dull and vain,
For thou wert weary of the sunless day,
The heavy fields of scentless asphodel,
The loveless lips with which men kiss in Hell.
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Written by
Barry Tebb |
Barbarous insult to Yeats’ memory and Claudel’s
Allen, thank God you are dead, you who breathed the air of Apollinaire,
Ghost of Reverdy bear witness to the mendacity of his clamour,
Hart Crane, rise from the estuary of the great river you drowned in,
John Clare, rise from your country churchyard grave,
Gray, from your carv?d tomb and Wilde, cast off your winged shield
In P?re Lachaise,
Rise poets, rise and drive the barbarous horde without the sacred gates
of Art
Where it has crept and quenched the flame, rendering the Nine silent
And bereft and covered in shame.
Pastmaster of Post Modernist jargon, defiler of the tombs of great poets
Whose souls hover in Elysium or crouch along the banks of black Lethe
Begging a crown to lay on Charon’s palm.
Souls of the great dead rise and deliver us from one who negates
Poetry as the realm of the numinous, toyer with words, vain hack of
Academe,
Spoiler of the silver stream of poetry’s wind-harp voice unseen
Traducer, seducer, traitor, hands red with blood, bearer of the ultimate guilt
Of trahison des clercs, murderer of the subtle spirit of Mallarm?,
Defiler of poetry’s purity as defined by Rilke and Val?ry
Praiser of ultimate poetastry-Duhig’s penny ranting-condemner of Jimmy Simmons-
One Leeds Jimmy who could fix the world’s Duhigs once and for all,
Write them into the ground and still have a hundred lyrics in his quiver.
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