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In the run-up to the anniversary of Peterloo, Jenny Farrell<\/strong> discusses political poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Kinsella<\/em><\/p>\n On 16 August 1819, tens of thousands of working men and women demonstrated in St. Peter’s Fields near Manchester demanding reform and the repeal of the Corn Laws. The yeomanry attacked, injuring over four hundred and killing eighteen. This slaughter went down in history as ‘Peterloo’. Shelley reacted with one of the earliest works of socialist literature, his famous ballad The Mask of Anarchy.<\/p>\n Shelley\u2019s lifetime was defined by the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and severe political repression in England and elsewhere in Europe. In contrast to other European countries, the power of the bourgeoisie in England had been consolidated in their own revolutionary period in the seventeenth century. Therefore, the ruling class in England had little sympathy for revolutionary France as it could potentially rouse the growing working class, which had been so far effectively suppressed.<\/p>\n The more violent the revolution in France became, the more alarmed the English bourgeoisie grew. Jacobinism was a threat to the ruling class, and this in England was the bourgeoisie, not the aristocracy. So, while in every other European state the deadly line was drawn between the nobility and the bourgeoisie, in England this confrontation took place between the bourgeoisie and the radicalised lower and working classes.<\/p>\n These times of both great political hope ignited by the French Revolution, and unprecedented social unrest among the dispossessed fuelled by the Industrial Revolution, produced radical leaders who came under attack and were imprisoned by the government in a campaign of repression and violence. Prime Minister William Pitt unleashed a crusade of \u2018white terror\u2019 and throughout the 1790s held treason trials, suspended habeas corpus, issued a Proclamation against Sedition, passed the Treason and Sedition Act, the Unlawful Oath Act and banned Corresponding Societies. However, the government attempt at silencing protest only led to further strife and the increase in rebellion, including nonconformist religions and atheism.<\/p>\n Until Napoleon\u2019s final defeat at the Battle at Waterloo in 1815, Britain was involved in a prolonged state of war. The first result of the peace was a severe political and economic crisis. A new, more political quality enters the riots and protests and the 1817 \u2018Gagging Acts\u2019 (the Treason Act and Seditious Meetings Act) served to further suppress radical agitation and publications. The political unrest of 1817 and the government\u2019s silencing tactics culminated in the Peterloo Massacre.<\/p>\n Shelley had left England for Italy in March 1818, and news of the massacre only reached him on 6 September. He set to work almost immediately, writing the 91 stanzas of The Mask of Anarchy<\/em> inside a few days. It is rightly considered one of the greatest political protest poems written in English.<\/p>\n On the 200th<\/sup> anniversary of these events this month, let\u2019s consider Shelley\u2019s great poem and the effect it had on two other poets \u2013 Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Kinsella.<\/p>\n The Mask of Anarchy<\/em> opens with a gruesome parade of the government\u2019s key players: Murder (Castlereagh – Foreign Secretary), Fraud (Eldon – Lord Chancellor), Hypocrisy (Sidmouth – Home Secretary), and other Destructions (bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies):<\/p>\n I met Murder on the way- III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. The poem continues, outlining Anarchy as the true ruler of England. On his rampage, he comes across Hope, looking like Despair, and Time running out:<\/p>\n \u2026 a maniac maid, XXIII. Hope then lies down before the horse\u2019s feet, in an act of passive resistance, and a vapour like shape appears that inspires the multitude with hope \u2013 and thought. The effect of this is announced in the next stanza, Anarchy, the ghastly birth,\/ Lay dead upon the earth. <\/em>There follow two stanzas, that are indelibly written into English socialist awareness:<\/p>\n XXXVII. XXXVIII. <\/em><\/p>\n Next, Shelley asks: \u2018What is Freedom? – ye can tell\/ That which slavery is, too well –<\/em> Shelley then, before giving his own view of what Freedom means, concludes:<\/p>\n This is Slavery – savage men,<\/em> The attributes of Freedom that Shelley outlines are: food, clothing, heating, true justice for all (ne\u2019er for gold<\/em>), wisdom, peace and love. Freedom is guided by science, poetry and thought, spirit, patience, gentleness.<\/p>\n Shelley\u2019s understanding of the fundamental clash between the propertied class in power and the working class, led Eleanor Marx to conclude in Shelley and Socialism<\/em>:<\/p>\n More than anything else that makes us claim Shelley as a Socialist is his singular understanding of the facts that to-day tyranny resolves itself into the tyranny of the possessing class over the producing, and that to this tyranny in the ultimate analysis is traceable almost all evil and misery.<\/em><\/p>\n Shelley goes on to say that the working people, the oppressed should meet the tyrants calmly, thereby shaming them. The poem however ends on a note not of passivity, but of action, returning to the stanza in the middle:<\/p>\n \u2018Rise like Lions after slumber Shelley’s Influence on Brecht<\/strong><\/p>\n The Mask of Anarchy<\/em> has not only become an early part of the canon of socialist English working-class literature; it is also an integral part of the international socialist literary heritage. Brecht uses this poem as an example of realism in his 1938 essay Breadth and Variety of the Realist Mode of Writing. In this he writes:\u00a0<\/p>\n If (Shelley\u2019s) great ballad \u2018The Mask of Anarchy\u2019, written immediately after the bloody upheaval in Manchester (1819), suppressed by the bourgeoisie, does not correspond to the common description of realist writing, we must ensure that the definition of realist writing is changed, expanded, and made more comprehensive.<\/em><\/p>\n A famous example of the survival of Shelley’s tradition is Brecht’s own poem of 1947 The Anachronistic Procession, or Freedom and Democracy<\/em>. Brecht, who follows Shelley\u2019s ballad form of four beat lines, describes in his poem a procession through the ruins of Western Germany after the war. A ragged procession carries two old boards, one bearing the faded inscription \u2018freedom\u2019, the other \u2018democracy\u2019: At the head a featherbrain<\/em>. He is followed by Two in monkish garb <\/em>from under which emerges a jackboot. They hold up a flag with the swastika\u2019s hooks removed. And there are others: company directors from the arms industry, teachers, doctors, academics, \u201cde-Nazified\u201d Nazis in high offices, \u201cstormtrooper\u201d editors, a judge exonerating all of \u201cHitlerism\u201d, and many more:<\/p>\n Then the faceless trust directors Keeping step, next march the teachers Then the medical advisers Three grim dons, whose reputation Next our whitewashed Nazi friends Brecht\u2019s succinct and apparently detached voice is similar to Shelley\u2019s. Like Shelley, this results in vicious satire. However, Brecht targets the essentially unchanged society in the West of Germany, then under Western Allied control. He takes from Shelley the form and the idea of a procession of the perpetrators of inhumanity. While in Shelley\u2019s poem, these represent government and power, Brecht shows how both the ordinary and the powerful Nazis of a few short years ago are not only whitewashing themselves, they have retained, thinly disguised, their posts of influence. De-Nazification is shown to be a meaningless fa\u00e7ade in this part of Germany. Now their chant has changed to a deceptive and hollow cry for US style \u201cFreedom and Democracy\u201d.<\/p>\n Bundesarchiv<\/em><\/p>\n As the procession reaches the \u201cCapital of the Movement\u201d (Munich), six Vices emerge from the \u2018brown house\u2019. They are Oppression, the Plague, Fraud, Stupidity, Murder, and Robbery.<\/p>\n Bony hand grasping a whip<\/em> In a rusty tank, much greeted<\/em> After him see FRAUD appear<\/em> Older than the hills, an yet<\/em> Lolling back, as at a play<\/em> Shaken by the latest crises<\/em> Leave the rubble in their masses <\/em> Here, Brecht both follows and varies Shelley. While Shelley conjures up Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy, Destruction and Anarchy, Brecht lets Oppression, Plague, Fraud, Stupidity, Murder, and Robbery appear. Murder, Fraud and Anarchy emerge in both ballads. Destruction made an appearance in Brecht\u2019s brain-corrupting<\/em> teachers. He also castigates Hypocrisy mercilessly in the Vices of Capital\u2019s chant for “Freedom and Democracy”. Brecht places further accents, aspects which he also sees continuing in West Germany, and which were instrumentally involved in the catastrophe of fascism: Stupidity and a metaphorical Plague. Shelley depicts the vices that accompany the dictatorship of Capital at the beginning of the 19th<\/sup> century; Brecht, writing after the Holocaust\u00a0\u2013 in the sense of the all-encompassing genocide \u2013 of the world wars, emphasises both the continuity and the development of these vices 128 years on.<\/p>\n Brecht offers no call to the German people that may be compared to Shelley\u2019s \u201cMen of England\u201d verses. His insight into the merely cosmetic changes in the Western Allies\u2019 part of Germany was remarkable in 1947, and its truth was borne out in the years that followed. Brecht\u2019s poem (and thereby Shelley\u2019s) lived on in the imperialist part of Germany. In 1980, a political street theatre took place in protest against Franz Josef Strauss, the rightwing CDU\/CSU candidate for prime minister at that time. A procession was made up of pedestrians and vehicles. In the final vehicle stood mechanical dolls representing Oppression, Plague, Fraud, Stupidity, Murder and Robbery. All wore masks of former Nazi greats, who were firmly held in their seats by a performer wearing a Strauss mask. Brecht’s daughter Hanne Hiob was centrally involved in this performance.<\/p>\n Another anachronistic procession, from Bonn to Berlin, took place in 1990, reiterating Brecht\u2019s caution against fascist tendencies in a reunited Germany. Even today, more than 70 years after the The Anachronistic Procession<\/em> was written, Brecht’s warning has lost absolutely none of its validity, as Germany is involved in wars once again, and the fascist AfD is gaining in power at a fast and frightening pace.<\/p>\n Shelley’s Influence on Kinsella<\/strong><\/p>\n Finally, a further famous echo of The Mask of Anarchy<\/em> is Thomas Kinsella\u2019s A Butcher\u2019s Dozen<\/em>. Kinsella\u2019s poem, again in four beat line ballad form, is about another British massacre, in this sense closer to the events of Peterloo. In Derry, on Bloody Sunday, 13 people died as Britain\u2019s soldiers shot dead randomly unarmed civilians on a civil rights demonstration, one person died later of his injuries.<\/p>\n Like Shelley, Kinsella uses an \u2018I\u2019 who revisits the scene of murder:<\/p>\n I went with Anger at my heel <\/em> A month had passed. Yet there remained <\/em> Instead of encountering the perpetrators, this speaker comes across the victims, who speak. These victims expose their attackers, who like in Shelley\u2019s poem represent the British repressive state:<\/p>\n A harsher stirred, and spoke in scorn: <\/em> ……<\/p>\n Another ghost stood forth, and wet<\/em> Like Shelley, Kinsella offers a solution, albeit a different one \u2013 British withdrawal from Ireland:<\/p>\n If England would but clear the air This is not an appeal to rise \u201clike lions\u201d against the oppressor, rather the speaker in this poem hopes that some kind of peace and reconciliation among those living in Ireland after British withdrawal might be achieved, perhaps in the way that Hope in Shelley\u2019s poem puts an end to Anarchy.<\/p>\n The Mask of Anarchy<\/em> was not published during Shelley\u2019s lifetime, as Leigh Hunt, editor of The Examiner<\/em>, the paper Shelley had sent the manuscript to for publication in September 1819, justly feared persecution by the state. He recognised the poem\u2019s inflammatory nature that it has kept to this day. Since its publication and to this day, lines from The Mask of Anarchy<\/em> accompany and inspire people on their road to freedom.<\/p>\n![\"peterloo](\"images\/culture\/jenny_farrell\/peterloo_peterloo.jpg\")
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He had a mask like Castlereagh \u2013
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:<\/p>\n
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.<\/p>\n
Next came Fraud, and he had on,
Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well,
Turned to mill-stones as they fell.<\/p>\n
And the little children, who
Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem,
Had their brains knocked out by them.<\/p>\n
Clothed with the Bible, as with light,
And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy
On a crocodile rode by.<\/p>\n
And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes,
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.<\/p>\n
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips,
Like Death in the Apocalypse.<\/p>\n
And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw-
\u2018I am God, and King, and Law!\u2019
<\/em><\/p>\n
And her name was Hope, she said:
But she looked more like Despair,
And she cried out in the air:<\/p>\n
\u2018My father Time is weak and gray
With waiting for a better day;
See how idiot-like he stands,
Fumbling with his palsied hands!<\/em><\/p>\n
\u2018Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another;<\/p>\n
\u2018Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.<\/p>\n
He then goes on to outline in a savage and empathic way the condition of the working class in England and how they are killed at whim: \u2018And at length when ye complain\/ With a murmur weak and vain\/ \u2018Tis to see the Tyrant\u2019s crew\/ Ride over your wives and you-\/ Blood is on the grass like dew.<\/em> This is an allusion to the protests over the recent years.<\/p>\n
Or wild beasts within a den<\/em>
Would endure not as ye do-<\/em>
But such ills they never knew.<\/em><\/p>\n
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n
Those men\u2019s patrons and protectors:
Pray, for our arms industry
Freedom and Democracy<\/p>\n
Toadying, brain-corrupting creatures
For the right to educate
Boys to butchery and hate. <\/p>\n
Hitler\u2019s slaves, mankind\u2019s despisers
Asking, might they now select
A few Reds to vivisect.<\/p>\n
Rests on mass extermination
\u2026<\/p>\n
On whom the new State depends:
Body lice, whose pet preserve is
In the higher civil service.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n![\"Peterloo](\"images\/culture\/jenny_farrell\/Peterloo_Hitler.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
First OPPRESSION takes a trip<\/em>
In a half-track furnished free<\/em>
By our heavy industry.<\/em><\/p>\n
Next comes PLAGUE. His breath is foetid.<\/em>
To conceal his flaking skin<\/em>
He wraps a brown scarf round his chin.<\/em><\/p>\n
Brandishing a jug of beer.<\/em>
You will get your glasses filled when<\/em>
You have let him take your children.<\/em><\/p>\n
Still out for what she can get<\/em>
STUPIDITY staggers on board<\/em>
Riveted she stares at Fraud.<\/em><\/p>\n
MURDER too is on his way<\/em>
Perfectly at ease as he<\/em>
Hums: Sweet dream of liberty.<\/em><\/p>\n
ROBBERY materialises<\/em>
In Field-Marshal\u2019s uniform<\/em>
With the globe beneath his arm.<\/em>
Each of these six grisly figures <\/em>
Firmly based, with ready triggers <\/em>
Says that there has got to be <\/em>
Freedom and Democracy.<\/em>
Finally:<\/em>
\u2026 great rats <\/em><\/p>\n
Join the column as it passes <\/em>
Squeaking \u2018Freedom!\u2019 as they flee<\/em>
\u2018Freedom and Democracy!\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n![\"Peterloo](\"images\/culture\/jenny_farrell\/Peterloo_Tk2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Through Bogside of the bitter zeal <\/em>
– Jesus pity! – on a day <\/em>
Of cold and drizzle and decay. <\/em><\/p>\n
A murder smell that stung and stained. <\/em><\/p>\n
\u201cThe shame is theirs, in word and deed, <\/em>
Who prate of justice, practise greed, <\/em>
And act in ignorant fury – then,<\/em>
Officers and gentlemen,<\/em>
Send to their Courts for the Most High<\/em>
To tell us did we really die!<\/em>
Does it need recourse to law<\/em>
To tell ten thousand what they saw?<\/em>
Law that lets them, caught red-handed,<\/em>
Halt the game and leave it stranded,<\/em>
Summon up a sworn inquiry<\/em>
And dump their conscience in the diary.<\/em>
During which hiatus, should<\/em>
Their legal basis vanish, good,<\/em>
The thing is rapidly arranged:<\/em>
Where\u2019s the law that can\u2019t be changed?<\/em>
The news is out. The troops were kind.<\/em>
Impartial justice has to find<\/em>
We\u2019d be alive and well today<\/em>
If we had let them have their way.<\/em><\/p>\n
Dead lips that had not spoken yet:<\/em>
\u201cMy curse on the cunning and the bland,<\/em>
On gentlemen who loot a land<\/em>
They do not care to understand;<\/em>
Who keep the natives on their paws <\/em>
With ready lash and rotten laws;<\/em>
Then if the beasts erupt in rage<\/em>
Give them a slightly larger cage<\/em>
And, in scorn and fear combined,<\/em>
Turn them against their own kind.<\/em><\/p>\n
And brood at home on her disgrace<\/em><\/p>\n