Appendix A - Three Chartist poems

Summary

CHARLES DAVLIN, ‘ON A CLIFF WHICH O'ERHUNG’

(NORTHERN STAR, 5 OCTOBER 1839, 7)

On a cliff which o'erhung the huge billows that hove

Their white foam, to the war waging skies;

Sat Britannia consulting the daughter of Jove,

Rebel faction, how best to chastise.

When Minerva, soft tuned as the lute on the gale,

Said the gods had decreed hence that justice prevail,

That the millions, whose pacific arguments fall,

Shall for death or for liberty rise.

Whilst contemn'd and despised are the lion and crest,

Shall the late laurell'd Queen of the waves

Boast her millions so long, so exclusively blessed,

So remote from the bondage of slaves?

Shall her time-serving tools still continue to sing,

Of her famed Constitution, Lords, Commons, and King,

While a Church and Statemongrel, hermaphrodite thing,

That loud long-boasted, lion outbraves?

Shall hoarse Neptune's proud daughter, whose menace was fate,

Deign to plead, but with scorn to be heard,

And her famed royal brute, by mere monkeys of state,

Be audaciously pluck'd by the beard?

Ere that the lion should long thus in torpitude sleep,

Or thyself thus degraded, degenerate weep,

Be thy last crumbling atoms dispers'd through the deep,

Nor the tomb of thy mem'ry be rear'd.

That fell hydra, which preys on thy heart's inmost core,

Still around thee whose coils vilely hang

That political tape-worm, from darkness of yore

And the law primogeniture sprang.