‘The New Satanic Mills’: A Poem by Paul Martin Freeman

The New Satanic Mills

“And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?”  —William Blake

Whatever’s happened to that scepter’d isle,
That earth of majesty, that seat of Mars,
Where aged veterans were wont to smile,
And strip their sleeves and proudly show their scars?

Whatever’s happened to that happy breed
That happily for her would go to war;
Relinquish dearest life for England’s need
And blaze in deathless glory evermore?

Whatever’s happened to that liberty
For which they struggled for a thousand years,
Defending it from foreign tyranny,
And paying the price in blood and toil and tears?

Has all that richness gone, that precious treasure,
To be by empty nothingness replaced?
Oh, England! shamed you are by us forever,
While we ourselves are shamefully disgraced.

For what is left when governments conspire
Against the people in whose name they rule;
Force-feed their cities, towns and every shire,
And choke their every hospital and school?

And what survives when girls are sacrificed
Upon diversity’s ignoble altar;
When right and decency are compromised
Protecting not assaulted but assaulter?

And what remains when merely outraged words
Are reason to remove that liberty,
As law its loins with haste indecent girds
To serve not justice but authority?

For such is now our broken throne of kings
That for the crown of nations once would vie,
But suffering such outrageous fortune’s slings,
Seems every day a little more to die.

The wombs of English girls contain our future,
While in them lives our nation’s teeming past,
And when we fear to challenge the abuser,
All Heaven stands affronted and aghast.

And when so vilely we betray our daughters,
And to their piteous cries are stony deaf,
We surely plumb the most unholy waters,
And tell the world of kingly England’s death.

And just as nothing palpably displays
The dying of a nation’s noble pride,
Or demonstrates a terminal malaise
As when for its defence it won’t provide;

So nothing surer manifests decay,
Or shows it spiralling downwards uncontrolled,
Than when for votes its leaders give away
Its finest treasures far surpassing gold.

And could there be a villainy to equal
The cynical betrayal of children here,
When guardians of the law consort with evil,
Or pockets fat with cash its victims smear?

And who will say that dark Satanic Mills
Have not arisen again in English towns,
In ugly blots across our northern hills,
Where something hellish now the landscape crowns?

Yet not the factories of a bygone age
Against whose soullessness would poets rail,
But dens of foul imported hate and rage
And gang rape on a vast industrial scale.

And this is now that land for which they fought
Whose dust forever rests in foreign fields,
Whose love of country was so fiercely wrought
Still undiminished is the power it wields.

Or dare we think that England’s spirit lives,
And only sleeps within the breasts of men;
That faithless is the heart which thus misgives
And thinks this England will not rise again?

That such an aberration cannot stand
Where God and Nature from themselves are turned
As in our erstwhile green and pleasant land
With all the majesty of England spurned?

And dare we hope that this is just a phase
Through which all nations sometimes have to pass;
That England will again the world amaze,
And from the flames emerge like tempered brass?

For nothing can contain the will for freedom,
Which tumbles in a fury like a flood,
As all in Nature has a time and season,
A time for lawfulness and time for blood;

While all is willed within the womb of time
Where England might restore her broken soul;
Cast out this criminality and crime,
And be again an undivided whole.

For so she must, and so we must believe,
Though how or when is not for us to know.
Till then, for England must the English grieve,
And hold themselves in readiness to go.

Paul Martin Freeman is an art dealer in London. His book of whimsical verse, A Chocolate Box Menagerie, is published by New English Review Press. This poem is from the his unpublished work, The Bus Poems: A Tale of the Devil.