Labour's Election Victory ~ (July 1945)

Grandad's epic poem:

The Dawn,
And Promise!
Will it be fulfilled?
The begrimed streets
With assurances are billed.
And will they be forgotten e'er the bills rot:
False-speech and lip-served principles besot
And deceive, again, a weary world?

England has chosen a Labour Government now,
And none may claim it lacks majority:
Full tide has come to implement each vow,
For common good wield common authority.
The people quaff new hope, decades of dreams
Flood into vital awakening, hearts beat free,
And eyes, woe-sunken, gleam with wistful incredulity.

As though the yearning womb of the teeming Earth,
Had ministered this happening to birth,
The rivals nations' babel blends to a single voice,
The East an West acclaim the People's choice:
They glorify the vision, now tangible to be,
Of common men with common aim shaping their destiny.


May none betray that vision centuries of anguish bred,
But with will emancipative its Grief-born pledge sustain:
By iron law of Faith be dispelled by Tradition's dread,
Else it shall re-enslave, and hope and fervour wane.
Private conceit disrupts: the sacred task
Will wreck on demagogy and self-parade:
Not fine points of procedure, but deeds long o'erdue men ask,
That shall forever found and prosper a worthier Age.

Subtle and many the schemes ruthless Privilege will devise,
To invalidate reform, and progressive aims abort:
And every kind of sabotage, insidiously, it will try,
To withold the Peace the Plenty, long possible and long sought.


O may your fleets be in loyal command,
Your Air Armadas not in caste's control,
And may your Armies not fail faithful to stand,
When mad Reaction conspires to crush your soul.


Thousands have trod the way - the Appian Way of the crucified,
The Way of Agony in the Wilderness of Republican Spain:
The Atomic Dawn, throughout milleniums prophesied,
Shall it prelude salvation, or end the White Man's reign?


In the same holy Cause, the Nazerene defied
Even to the Cross, the pharisaical vipers of usury:
Be now unloosed their hold, action immediate be undenied:
The people's toil let fill the people's treasury.


No propertied class has ever, without a fight,
Relinquished of its privilege and power:
But ardour flees the unjust when opposed by equal might;
They scatter to Old World havens, to await Reaction's hour.


Attains our civilisation to its Zenith Day, 
It shall avail for Man a Wider and Freer Way,
Or be eclipsed, cataclysmic, in annihilative strife,
As Inca, Egypt, Athens with plague and famine rife.
Its grandeur in ruins crumble, its towns fatalism and banditry haunt:
The wild ass bray contempt amid its depopulated vaunt:
And when shall come the Others, they shall mourn the ideal wrecked
Upon barbaric altars, by misdirected intellect.


No pampered class has ever had the inclination to redeem
Humanity from want and inter-nation suicide:
Though plausible diplomats of the public school may seem
in motive altruistic, on labouring backs they are schooled to ride.
With smug ineptitude, well-fed, well-housed, well-clad,
They preen themselves superior, in judgement unprejudiced -
Superior, in truth, to the struggle for home and bread:
Indifferent, not unbiased, beneath ponderous camouflage
Of pompous, sonorous diction concealing mental vacuity:
O, to high office, a tie, not merit, the Open Sesame.
Who shall his lofty purpose to this perverted clique trust,
His Cause shall be dishallowed and trampled in the dust.


Boundless as the universe
Is the scope of Social Man.
His lodestar - the Evolving Genius
Of World-conscious Dominion.
Who shall that lodestar follow
Shall prosper: but who turn back
Shall be destroyed; the challenge
Of the Vastness, none may sidetrack.
Fulfil its higher dictate, the limitless prospect is divine:
Repudiate and perish, no alternative is thine.