greykit.poetry — #protest
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1843
[elizabeth-barrett-browning]
The Cry of the Children
A protest poem on child labor in the mines and factories of England — the children weeping in the playtime of the others, dying before their time, their sob cursing deeper in the silence than the strong man in his wrath.
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1832
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
The Masque of Anarchy
Written in response to the Peterloo Massacre (1819), in which cavalry charged a crowd of 60,000 reformers in Manchester — Shelley's furious call for non-violent resistance, cataloguing the allegorical figures of Murder, Fraud, and Hypocrisy and ending with the clarion "Rise like Lions after slumber / In unvanquishable number.
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1819
[percy-bysshe-shelley]
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised and dying king, princes who are the dregs of their dull race, a people starved and stabbed in the untilled field — a catalogue of graves from which a glorious Phantom may burst.
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1673
[john-milton]
Sonnet XV: On the late Massacher in Piemont
Written on the slaughter of the Waldensians in 1655: Avenge O Lord thy slaughter'd Saints — mothers and infants rolled down the rocks, their moans redoubled from the vales to the hills to heaven, their blood sown to grow a hundredfold against the triple tyrant.