General Election 2010: The Poets Speak
by and published in Edition Eleven of Pomegranate
“Keep poetry and politics apart.” So runs the cry of the sentimentalist and the pedant. Those who believe that the arts of language, practised by those inspired makers, who rise above the common race of mankind and give to the inarticulate spiritings of the sensory world that great order and beauty which we wonder at, have nothing to say about the General Election soon to take place in this country, may pass over this collection. Others may perhaps be willing to read the contributions of some of the most intensely accessible and relevant poets of today.
Emily Dickinson
Because I could not vote for Brown
I turned Conservative –
I bid my startled Soul – be calm –
My wavering – forgive.
It answered, “Yes, but what about
Their EU schism, or
The Police and Criminal Evidence Act
Of 1984?”
I saw a headstone on the grass –
I thought my death had come –
I closed my eyes – and marked a cross –
Beside the words – “Lib Dem” –
Ted Hughes
When the Labour Party dropped Clause Four
Crow was furious.
Vomiting up his intestines, he wrote a very stern letter to Tribune.
God refused to publish it.
‘What a loser,’ Crow remarked to the bullfinch
Who was disgusted by the woodpecker’s thumping.
The ostriches had invented a new form of sewage
Which yelled all over the wronged obesity of the forest
Shouted its head off into the filthy ground
Screamed at the desensitised pines
Until it got a sore throat.
They called it ‘Politics’.
Then Crow smashed a plank of wood over Ed Miliband’s head
And Liam Fox drew a policy statement out of his navel
And the putrescent Scottish Nationalists coughed up globs of blood.
‘I’m definitely voting Green,’ Crow thought.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
I weep for Gordon Brown – for he is dead!
O Labour, on whose red rose I have gazed,
By whose pale gleam my spirit has been led
Through lightless caverns and grey mists, and, dazed,
Through this weak world as one who questions Truth
Not vigorously when in a polling-booth,
Now hear me! To an inbox have I come
Where, like Proserpin in her ruined Fame,
Who wandered in the fields bereft and dumb,
An emailed memo lies. It reads: “My name
Is Ozymandelson, king of spin: Cower,
Ye Tories!” Power, hast thou lost thy Power?
Philip Larkin
In the vast blaze of monitors they stand
And almost think themselves normal blokes,
Before a soundman signals to begin. So
It comes round: the mirror-worn-out jokes,
The traffic-jamless journeys, the unplanned
Presented infants, the tamed claps. All know
That they are going to die: knowledge that fills
Each Cabinet meeting, neither sinister
Nor unseen; and yet the Minister
For Business, Innovation and Skills
Knows this is one thing that can’t be reformed.
I watch them ignoring it. We
All do: what else is to be done?
No good to think of how the memory
Returns to times when significance yawned
And not the rest of life: the things begun,
Abandoned, left as static as cement.
I remove my shirt in front of the debate.
How cold it gets at half-past-eight,
How soon the time is melted down and spent.
Edmund Clerihew Bentley
Nick Clegg
Was taken down a peg
By a man who said, “Stop being so strident
About the urgent necessity of scrapping Trident.”
John Dryden
[…]
I shall not vote: as long as we consult
The multitude we’ll find the right result.
One-man-one-vote, as history will attest,
Is of all kinds of government the best.
Democracy! O all-benevolent Lord
Whose generosity we spread abroad!
When trust in all else wavers, we are sure
Of this your novel and eternal law:
Rule by the people – failing that, the rule
Of people who attended the same school.
Democracy! All bodies not approved
By your great principle must be removed:
Because the Commons is so much disgraced,
All but the Commons must now be replaced.
Corrupt MPs were brought in by election,
And so the Lords must face the same selection.
The Monarchy (which has the approbation
Of only slightly over half the nation)
Must cede to Democratic government,
Whose mandate stands at twenty-two per cent.
Almighty crowd, you shorten all debate,
Your power certain and your wisdom great!
Nor faith nor reason can make you delay:
You leapfrog all eternal truths in your Wordsworthian way!
Athens, no doubt, did righteously decide
When Phocion and when Socrates were tried;
The US acted on the best advice
In voting for George Bush not once, but twice.
Perhaps they later thought it a mistake;
But crowds are right, whichever path they take:
As when they say they have grown sick of Blair,
And once he’s gone, make plans to crown his heir.
[…]
Daniel Hitchens
Dan Hitchens was a Foyle Young Poet in 2006, and won second place in the youth category for The Times Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry Translation 2007.