'AN OLD, MAD, BLIND, DESPISED, AND DYING KING'

Shelley’s great and angry “Sonnet: England in 1819” doesn’t quite reflect the feelings I and doubtless many of my contemporaries have about today’s nauseating storming of the U.S. Capitol by a delusional mob following Trump’s cowardly encouragement (he himself of course didn’t show up to lead what Joe Biden aptly called a seditious “insurrection”).

To be sure, the poet was responding to a bloodier event, the “Peterloo Massacre,” in which a cavalry force, with sabers drawn, charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people, resulting in between nine and seventeen deaths and four to seven hundred injuries. (The massacre followed an acute economic slump made worse by the Corn Laws, which kept the price of bread high, during a time when only about 11% of adult males had the vote.) (To date, one person has died as a result of a shooting during the Trump-inspired attack and several police were injured.)

Yet the sonnet was the first poem that came to mind as I watched, first, the baseless charade of Ted Cruz and his silly Republican comrades protesting the ratification of Biden’s electoral college victory, a performance which softened the Capitol for the ensuing violent invasion.

The first line of this great political poem does chime, in the height of its dudgeon, with an outrage worthy of what should be our nation’s response to Trump’s near putsch. Indeed, I thought I remembered that one of Shelley’s five derogatory adjectives (I can almost hear the poet spitting them out) was “bad.” The juxtaposition of “mad” and “blind” seems to have done the trick.

The second line, about lowlife princes, captures the backtracking of the Trump sycophants in Congress, with Kevin McCarthy and a Congressman from Louisiana, for example, attempting to outdo themselves in deploring the violence they had set the stage for. And although it may be hard to envision until the smoke of today’s events clears, Shelley’s rage unearths the hope of a forthcoming salutary clarity arising out of the graves of the Senate, “from which a glorious Phantom may/Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.”

From his godly pen to God’s ears.

Sonnet: England In 1819.

By Percy Bysshe 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.

PICTURE CREDIT: "Trump" by Cowgirl111 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0