Imitating Wolcott

James Wolcott, of whom there is hardly a better, just reprinted a poem by P.B. Shelley which pretty accurately sums up what many must be thinking about Bush's autocratic and bungling handling of FEMA and the Katrina aftermath. Here's another.

SONNET: ENGLAND IN 1819.

An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,—
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring,—
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leech-like to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow,—
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field,—
An army, which liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield,—
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A Senate,—Time’s worst statute, unrepealed,—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.

Shelley was reviled as an atheist, but he knew that the establishment of his time had abandoned Christianity for a sanitized and wealth-worshipping farrago of greed.