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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 556
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WCL 556 May 2007
Poets' corner
It was an Englishman who declared that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world and it was another English poet who wrote a very striking prophecy, prefacing it with the following lines:
“When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be.”
In the way of poets, on the edge of the ocean, and gazing, as is also the wont of the young, at the Milky Way, Alfred Tennyson philosophised about youth, life and death, turning his thoughts into the poem Locksley Hall. But he began with an address to “Comrades” who, in view of what came later, one may reasonably infer might be translated as ‘fellow world citizens!’
“With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of time;
When the centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed;”
And it included a pair of lines one of which has engraved itself in the minds of a great many people who recall little, if any, other poetry:
“In the spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish'd dove;
In the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”
But his vision of the future was clear:
“Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
The Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;"
Although he was probably thinking of lighter than air balloons, which presumably global warming may yet drive us to:
"Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;
Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.
There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.”
It is a fact little-known, that President Harry Truman kept a cutting with that poem in his wallet, throughout his life. Like most Victorians, indeed most people before the 20th century, Tennyson was apprehensive about the coming of democracy, even though recognising its inevitability:
"To which all order festers, all things here are out of joint.
Science moves, but slowly, slowly, creeping on from point to point;
Slowly comes a hungry people, as a lion, creeping nigher,
Glares at one that nods and winks behind a slowly-dying fire.
Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs,
And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.”
And he proclaimed the common belief in western progress:
“Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.”
There was no naivete in his Victorian view of world affairs, but he could foresee the future better than the majority of his contemporaries, battling for empire as he put it:
“But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honor feels
And the nations do but murmur, snarling at each other's heels.”
What can world citizens draw from this notable poem written over 150 years ago by one "unacknowledged legislator of the world"? Surely that we are indeed on the path to "universal law", if only slowly, becase, as he put it:
“Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers...”
John Roberts
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