University of Virginia Library

Jubilee before Revolution

By W. M.

‘Tell me, O Muse of the shifty, the man who wandered afar’,
So have I chanted of late, and of Troy burg wasted of war—
Now of the sorrows of menfolk that fifty years have been,
Now of the grace of the commune I sing, and the days of a queen!
Surely I curse rich menfolk, ‘the Wights of the Whirlwind’ may they—
This is my style of translating “Αρπυιαι—snatch them away!
The rich thieves rolling in wealth that make profit of labouring men,
Surely the Wights of the Whirlwind shall swallow them quick in their den!
O baneful, O wit-straying, in the burg of London ye dwell,
And ever of profits and three per cent. are the tales ye tell;
But the stark, strong Polyphemus shall answer you back again,
Him whom ‘No man slayeth by guile and not by main’.
(By ‘main’ I mean ‘main force’, if aught at all do I mean;
In the Greek of the blindfold bard it is simpler the sense to glean.)
You, Polyphemus shall swallow and fill his mighty maw,
What time he maketh an end of the Priests, the Police, and the Law;
And then, ah, who shall purchase the poems of old that I sang;
Who shall pay twelve-and-six for an epic in Saga slang?
But perchance even ‘Hermes the Flitter’ could scarcely expound what I mean,
And I trow that another were fitter to sing you a song for a queen.