Page:The complete poetical works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, including materials never before printed in any edition of the poems.djvu/371

 

LXXXIV

'And if then the tyrants dare 340

Let them ride among you there.
Slash, and stab, and maim, and hew,—
What they like, that let them do.

LXXXV

'With folded arms and steady eyes,

And little fear, and less surprise, 345
Look upon them as they slay^[1]
Till their rage has died away.

LXXXVI

'Then they will return with shame

To the place from which they came.
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek. 351

LXXXVII

'Every woman in the land

Will point at them as they stand —
They will hardly dare to greet
Their acquaintance in the street. 355

LXXXVIII

'And the bold, true warriors

Who have hugged Danger in wars^[2]
Will turn to those who would be free,
Ashamed of such base company.

LXXXIX

'And that slaughter to the Nation

Shall steam up like inspiration, 361
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.

xc

'And these words shall then become

Like Oppression's thundered doom
Kinging through each heart and brain, 366
Heard again— again— again—

xci

'Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew 370
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.'

 

NOTE ON THE MASK OF ANARCHY, BY MRS. SHELLEY

Though Shelley's first eager desire to excite his countrymen to resist openly the oppressions existent during 'the good old times' had faded with early youth, still his warmest sympathies were for the people. He was a republican, and loved a democracy. He looked on all human beings as inheriting an equal right to possess the dearest privileges of our nature; the necessaries of life when fairly earned by labour, and intellectual instruction. His hatred of any despotism that looked upon the people as not to be consulted, or protected from want and ignorance, was intense. He was residing near Leghorn, at Villa Valsovano, writing The Cenci, when the news of the Manchester Massacre reached us; it roused in him violent emotions of indignation and compassion. The great truth that the many, if accordant and resolute, could control the few, as was shown some years after, made him long to teach his injured countrymen how to resist. Inspired by these feelings, he wrote the Mask of Anarchy, which he sent to his friend Leigh Hunt, to be inserted in the Examiner, of which he was then the Editor.

'I did not insert it,' Leigh Hunt writes in his valuable and interesting preface to this poem, when he printed it in 1832, 'because I thought that the public at large had not become sufficiently discerning to do justice to the sincerity and kind-heartedness of the spirit that walked in this flaming robe of verse.' Days of outrage have passed away, and with them the exasperation that would

1. slay Wise MS.. Hunt MS., edd. 1839; stay ed. 1832.
2. in wars Wise MS., Hunt MS., ed. 1832; in the wars edd. 1839.