I.
But yesterday, your noble fathers bled
Upon the fields of France, where countless dead
Had found among the vines their final rest,
To gild with fame a venerated crest
Whose princely brandishing from age to age
Outlasted armies and the tyrant’s rage.
But yesterday, you bravely fought and won
A war against the socialistic Hun
Who sought to clap you in the helot’s chains
And seize the free world’s economic reins.
Again, but yesterday, the darkest hour
Of all the world you lifted by your power,
When many owed so much to you, so few,
Across all continents and oceans blue;
No sacrifice too great, no effort spared,
You rallied to the battle and declared,
In England’s name, the inauspicious fight
Against the German Marxist and his spite.
When fire from your once-peaceful skies rained down
On London’s ancient temples of renown,
Your valour triumphed over every fear
Whose darkness could not mute your English cheer.
You fought, yet weeping for your sons that died,
And rose to glory on your fathers’ pride!
II.
Would you, brave sons of Britain’s best
Now crawl in servitude at the behest
Of Prussia’s despot and her Eastbourne stooge,
And let your nation fall to subterfuge?
Would you embrace their Novus Ordo plot
To make you into something you are not,
Abandoning your martyrs’ ancient faith
In globalist apostasy to bathe,
Or sanctify Mohammed’s violent hordes
Who now seize power from your local lords?
Your government, a servile rubber-stamp,
Transforms your world into a migrant camp.
Already London teems with Saracens,
But will not welcome us Americans!
Full many are the masks that Satan wears:
Take Corbyn and his self-anointing airs,
Nicola Sturgeon and Theresa May,
Who nourish Brussels while your towns decay.
These bear no love for you and never will,
But count as meaningless the nation’s will.
For Britain’s debt you have these frauds to thank:
What is their “Europe” but a German bank?
Whose fattened bureaucrats, a pampered club,
Appropriate your wealth, your selves to snub!
Corrupt, they steal and loot without surcease:
What Hitler lost through war they grab through peace!
Would you allow their constant plundering
To go unspoken with their blundering?
Surrender speech to their repressive state
To share with the Chinese a eunuch’s fate?
Would you let England topple on the brink,
Whilst petty deskmen dictate what you think?
Or let robotic censors gag your cries,
Whilst leftists freely spew their shop-worn lies?
For, liberty is but an empty creed,
Until the day Tom Robinson is freed!
III.
Fair England, land of hills and columbine,
Most gracious isle of rills and eglantine,
Return to thy devout, ancestral ways,
The regal virtues of thy former days!
Come forth in all thy splendor, pow’r, and might,
Proclaim thy fealty to truth and right!
Arise, O England, take thy rightful place,
Let not the heathen thy good self debase!
The sun is rising on thy fields of green,
And glory waits for thee in stars unseen.
The sword of Arthur has ennobled thee:
Thou wast not made for chains and slavery.
The clang of battle on the winds of time
And shouts of knights that echo in my rhyme,
Resound this day in every village square
And rise to heaven like an antique prayer,
That there will always and forever be
An England where the mind and heart are free
To celebrate her once and future King
Whom prophets prophesied and poets sing,
That Mary’s Dowry not be spent in vain
But magnify the Holy Virgin’s reign,
When Christ shall every bond of hate unbind
And England hold a torch for all mankind.
Joseph Charles MacKenzie is a traditional lyric poet, the only American to have won Scottish International Poetry Competition. His poetry has appeared in The New York Times, The Scotsman (Edinburgh), The Independent (London), US News and World Report, Google News, and many other outlets. He writes primarily for the Society of Classical Poets (New York) and Trinacria (New York). MacKenzie has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
What an excellent piece of prose, illustrating the juncture we, and all free peoples, are now at. The grip of totalitarianism never went away, it just morphed into a different guise.
To quote Ronald Reagan; Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again.
Challenging times indeed.
I thank you, Mr. Gardner, for your refreshing response which serves to redirect us to what Tommy Robinson and the Brexit movement are all about. I think the “Letter to England” resonates precisely because of readers’ visceral understanding of freedom’s fragility and direct experience with the morphing of their once useful political institutions into mere tools of international communism.
That should read ‘tools of international capitalism’ surely. Most Senators, Congressmen and MP’s in Britain are in the pay of some corporate interest, lobby group, and dutifully pursue the aims of said corporate paymaster. Corruption is everywhere in the land of the free since Reagan and Thatcher decided to deregulate everything to allow their rich buddies to amass fortunes. Trumps tax cuts for the richest put millions in his own bank account how’s that for one of the most corrupt acts in history.
You mean the way the BBC (Bias Brussels Broadcasting) accepted over £4 million in cash from the EU?
The only E.U. grants are for a BBC international charity and independent drama production companies also can apply for funding assistance particularly in poorer regions. The news and world Service are funded from the license fee paid by households.
Notice Maclean’s rhetoric: “tools of international capitalism” and “corporate paymaster.” That’s as pure an example of communist verbiage as you’ll get this side of Venezuela. It’s a good bet that Maclean wears a hammer-and-sickle in his lapel, or maybe under his kilt. He probably stuff envelopes for Corbyn and the Labourite party.
MacKenzie’s point is well taken — the E.U uses its vast resources of wealth to subsidize a range of activities that it thinks will lengthen its propaganda reach. The tinpot tyrants in Brussels are, by inclination and education, coercive statists. If they can’t give direct orders, they’ll use their purse strings to force change. They’ll support the lying scum in mainstream media (especially the BBC) any way they can. Payment for “a BBC international charity” and “independent drama production companies” only frees up cash for other BBC projects. I guess Maclean has never balanced a budget.
As for Trump’s economic policies, they have given us the longest stockmarket boom in U.S. history, and our unemployment rate has plummeted. The American left, of course, is in frenzied despair over this.
This Maclean character is like Cool Hand Luke — you punch him senseless, and he still keeps getting up to be knocked down again. Keep at it, Hughie! It’s good exercise for us here.
Salemi salami wtf. You really are clueless on the E.U. as it is a neoliberal organisation ensuring rigid financial controls and austerity after the crash when some member states economies went under-Greece for example. It imposed rigid fiscal constraints in return for a bail out loan that impoverished the country, shut down its public services and left the population going hungry. So yes they used their purse string to force the harshest terms possible and privatised all utilities and local government services. So yes the parasite shareholders moved in and bled the country dry.
The BBC is 97% funded by the license fee paid by households. The Tory scum threatened this with privatisation and have forced strict controls on the amount households pay. This is the root of the financial difficulties the BBC faces with Murdoch like a vulture waiting for pickings off the carcass. Salemi clueless again sitting in his ivory tower, accepting Trumps buck and staying a loyal ass kisser. I take it your freeloader shares are doing ok.
America, like Britain, has a government bumming about low unemployment but this is an illusion hiding the realty of pay stagnation for 10 years, temporary contracts in the gig economy, zero hour contracts, and employers working staff to exhaustion. Amazon is the most brutal and of course a US export paying no tax to host nations. The Tories have removed Union powers to facilitate this exploitation. Workers (makers) have lost 26% of the national income in the last eight years with elites(takers) being handed this freebie. How rich do you want to be for gods sake.
Salemi still thinks it’s the McCarthy era with a red under every bed. Clueless.
Here is the kind of world that Hugh MacLean and the buck-toothed miscreant Octavio-Cortez wish would return:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmHBJUMStVM
Dictatorship of the right or left are indistinguishable. Orwell was the first to write about this. Your type of leader Mr Mackenzie ,Hitler, Franco, I think we’re involved in some unhealthy pursuits that led to one or two disappearing. And let’s not forget the darling of Thatcher version of authoritarian rule, yes you’ve guessed it Pinochet. How many vanished under that iron heel.
Me I like democracy at the least you can get rid of Thatcher or Trump after a few years of hell. Your post was a juvenile, crude attempt at discrediting me -you’ll be joining Salami in the gutter shortly.
It looks like Hug MacLean, whose identifying data is now known to the editorship of this venue, is a little embarrassed by the Hitlerian foundations of Merkle’s German socialism which he defends against Brexit and the British freedom movement.
Unfortunate, isn’t it, Mr. MacLean, that your lost world was so handily flushed down the toilet of history on the night of November 7, 2016?
As a consolation, you can go back to your mother’s basement, where you live, and light candles in front of your Ocasio-Cortez poster as you sing the Internationale.
It looks like Hughie is getting desperate. I haven’t had someone make fun of my surname since kindergarten days. It brings back childhood memories.
Feeling the polemical heat, Maclean? Perhaps you’d better ask Dr. Rhind for help, especially with proper English grammar and punctuation. You could use some work.
Yes, we still have communists in the United States. They now call themselves “leftists,” “socialists,” or “progressives,” and they tend to be undercover Gramscians rather than raging Bolsheviks. Like your favorite anti-Semite, Jeremy Corbyn, they try to keep their real opinions hidden from public view.
I’m very glad you realize that the E.U. is a malign organization. It’s run by the Germans, and is nothing more than the Third Reich with a Smiley-Face button. I assume therefore that you voted for Brexit, for which I congratulate you. There’s hope for you yet, Hughie! I guess all your previous praise for the E.U. was just window-dressing.
By the way, our troops heading towards the border are being sent to protect our national sovereignty. Those invading scum aren’t “refugees” — they are agitators put together by leftist NGOs and leftist governments like Venezuela as a way to cause trouble. I tell you what, Maclean — how about if we redirect all of those so-called “refugees” to the Kentish coast, or Brighton, or the Thames estuary? Let them take over your damned country, OK? Then you can have the disease and crime that they bring. Since you despise your own identity, that will probably make you happy.
Although B. S. Eliud Acrewe’s critique of the “Letter to England” went largely undiscussed on this thread, I still insist that it is the poetry that matters, and should be the main focus @ SCP. This thread has gone far from the poem itself.
Still, one can be thankful for Mr. Salemi in correcting Mr. Maclean’s many historical distortions and mistakes, as, e.g., regarding the EU; something Uwe Carl Diebes did earlier on this thread in relation to Mr. MacKenzie’s historical distortions in his “Letter to England”.
One might be less satisfied with Mr. MacKenzie’s prose, though still appreciate his list regarding the viciousness of dictators of the 20th century, and his mention of ongoing infanticide.
I personally agree with Mr. Salemi that Tommy Robinson is “a real warrior for the English people”.
As to Mr. Maclean’s comment on George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) on dictatotships, we learned this week that Jeff Bezos (Jeffrey Preston Jorgenson) @ Amazon.com will no longer sell Tommy Robinson’s book “Mohammad’s Koran”. One could truly argue that the banning of person’s speech has a chilling effect on that person’s society. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others is one of the central tenets of socialist identity politics.
Despite Mr. Maclean’s newspeak (which is really Modernist/ Postmodernist oldspeak), any shift to the right and the good is not antidemocratic, and freedom does matter (though perhaps more to the Romantics than to us New Millennials), certainly than to Mr, Maclean.
As to Mr. Southerland’s contention that Mr. Maclean is not a Brit; he still seems to argue from a British (perhaps more Scots than Welsh or English) point of view; and James Eliot does not strike me as not British either. One could be wrong, but certainly one needs more proof.
Although I disagree with him on so many things (especially poetically), I can think of no greater polemicist in New Millennial America than Mr. Salemi. Does anyone out there have any other American contenders? Who would be at the top of British polemical prose now? or English polemical prose around the globe?
Your comment lacks cohesion, structure, sound reasoning, historical veracity, and truth. Please learn how to write or consider not commenting on this thread at all. Thank you.
Instead of wanting to silence a poet and literary critic, it would be better to focus on the British attempting to silence Tommy Robinson AGAIN.
I do not consider you a poet, much less a literary critic, nor do I wish to suppress the supreme evidence that you are neither: your own comments.
I thank you for your words. B. S. and Uwe do so too.
Allow us to be generous and say the same to you.