Songs for the City

“If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while auditing and bankers while banking?” — Tremendous Trifles

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Up my lads and lift the ledgers,
Sleep and ease are o’er.
Hear the Stars of Morning shouting:
‘Two and Two are four.’
Though the creeds and realms are reeling,
Though the sophists roar,
Though we weep and pawn our watches,
Two and Two are Four.

and, for times of financial crisis and courage –

There’s a run upon the Bank –
Stand away!
For the Manager’s a crank and the Secretary drank,
And the Upper Tooting Bank
Turns to bay!

Stand close: there is a run
On the Bank.
Of our ship, our royal one, let the ringing
Legend run,
That she fired with every gun
Ere she sank.

…and, the specimen verse of the Post-Office Hymn ran thus:

O’er London our letters are shaken like snow,
Our wires o’er the world like thunderbolts go.
The news that may marry a maiden in Sark,
Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park.

Chorus (with a swing of joy and energy):
Or kill an old lady in Finsbury Park.

– (1907-8).

On the family

It is a necessity far mankind; it is (if you like to put it so) a trap for mankind. Only by the hypocritical ignoring of a huge fact can any one contrive to talk of “free love”; as if love were an episode like lighting a cigarette, or whistling a tune. Suppose whenever a man lit a cigarette, a towering genie arose from the rings of smoke and followed him everywhere as a huge slave. Suppose whenever a man whistled a tune he “drew an angel down” and had to walk about forever with a seraph on a string. These catastrophic images are but faint parallels to the earthquake consequences that Nature has attached to sex; and it is perfectly plain at the beginning that a man cannot be a free lover; he is either a traitor or a tied man. The second element that creates the family is that its consequences, though colossal, are gradual; the cigarette produces a baby giant, the song only an infant seraph. Thence arises the necessity for some prolonged system of co-operation; and thence arises the family in its full educational sense.

 – What’s Wrong with the World (1910).

The Fanatic

We have thought long enough and talked long enough
And the world is weary of words.
And the sword is clockwork now –
A sullen wheel of swords.

Like sickening steams before the sun
The fumes of culture creep –
And the wise men laugh more sadly
Than the strong man used to weep.

And I know that clouds are alive and cling
And the dusty path is rough
But I know that the least grain of the dust
Has never been praised enough.

A single grain of the drifting dust,
If we took it and loved it well,
We could blow the trumpet North and South
And fight with the world and hell

And find the truth of an ancient thing
Lost in the oldest lyre.
It was the man who burnt his ships
Who set the Thames on fire.

– (1920).

“I will make it again”

There is one metaphor of which the moderns are very fond; they are always saying, “You can’t put the clock back.” The simple and obvious answer is “You can.” A clock, being a piece of human construction, can be restored by the human finger to any figure or hour. In the same way society, being a piece of human construction, can be reconstructed upon any plan that has ever existed.

There is another proverb, “As you have made your bed, so you must lie on it”; which again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.

– What’s Wrong with the World (1910).

The World State

Oh, how I love Humanity,
With love so pure and pringlish,
And how I hate the horrid French,
Who never will be English!

The International Idea,
The largest and the clearest,
Is welding all the nations now,
Except the one that’s nearest.

This compromise has long been known,
This scheme of partial pardons,
In ethical societies
And small suburban gardens –

The villas and the chapels where
I learned with little labour
The way to love my fellow-man
And hate my next-door neighbour.

– (1925).

“Tyrannies young as the morning”

We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one’s grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be.

 – What’s Wrong with the World (1910).

“Man could do no more”

In this story of Good Friday it is the best things in the world that are at their worst.  That is what really shows us the world at its worst. It was, for instance, the priests of a true monotheism and the soldiers of an international civilisation.  Rome, the legend, founded upon fallen Troy and triumphant over fallen Carthage, had stood for a heroism which was the nearest that any pagan ever came to chivalry. Rome had defended the household gods and the human decencies against the ogres of Africa and the hermaphrodite monstrosities of Greece. But in the lightning flash of this incident, we see great Rome, the imperial republic, going downward under her Lucretian doom. Scepticism has eaten away even the confident sanity of the conquerors of the world.  He who is enthroned to say what is justice can only ask: ‘What is truth?’  So in that drama which decided the whole fate of antiquity, one of the central figures is fixed in what seems the reverse of his true role.  Rome was almost another name for responsibility. Yet he stands for ever as a sort of rocking statue of the irresponsible. Man could do no more.  Even the practical had become the impracticable. Standing between the pillars of his own judgement-seat, a Roman had washed his hands of the world.

– The Everlasting Man (1925).

“Vulgarized”

All round they murmur, ‘O profane,
Keep thy heart’s secret hid as gold’;
But I, by God, would sooner be
Some knight in shattering wars of old,

In brown outlandish arms to ride,
And shout my love to every star
With lungs to make a poor maid’s name
Deafen the iron ears of war.

Here, where these subtle cowards crowd,
To stand and so to speak of love,
That the four corners of the world
Should hear it and take heed thereof.

That to this shrine obscure there be
One witness before all men given,
As naked as the hanging Christ,
As shameless as the sun in heaven.

These whimperers–have they spared to us
One dripping woe, one reeking sin?
These thieves that shatter their own graves
To prove the soul is dead within.

They talk; by God, is it not time
Some of Love’s chosen broke the girth,
And told the good all men have known
Since the first morning of the earth?

– (late 1890s).

“Only in the air”

The wisest thing in the world is to cry out before you are hurt. It is no good to cry out after you are hurt; especially after you are mortally hurt. People talk about the impatience of the populace; but sound historians know that most tyrannies have been possible because men moved too late. It is often essential to resist a tyranny before it exists. It is no answer to say, with a distant optimism, that the scheme is only in the air. A blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.

– Eugenics and Other Evils  (1922).

When You Are Old

When you are old, when candle and evening cloud
Decay beside you spinning in your chair,
Then sing this song and marvel and cry aloud,
“Great Ronsard praised me in the days when I was fair.”
There shall no maiden spin with you or sing
But shall say “Ronsard” and the name shall ring
And sound your name with everlasting praise.
I shall lie buried and a boneless shade,
By the pale myrtles pluck my last repose;
You will be sitting where the embers fade
Nodding and gazing as the last ash glows,
An old grey woman in grey garments furled.
You shall regret my love and your disdain.
Oh do not linger. Oh, before all is vain.
Gather, Oh gather the roses of the World.

– (c.1900).

This poem is a translation of Pierre de Ronsard’s Quand Vous Serez Bien Vielle.