Verses and Sonnets

Chapter 22: THE JUSTICE OF THE PEACE.

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About This Book

This collection assembles sonnets, short lyrics, grotesques and epigrams that shift between playful satire and serious meditation. Poems evoke nocturnal reverie, pastoral songs, seasonal sonnets for each month, and compact narrative sketches, while recurring themes include youth and ageing, love and honour, music and faith, mortality and urban poverty. Formal variety—from polished sonnet sequences to biting epigrams—allows intimate love poems to sit beside comic portraits and moral reflections, producing a compact, varied lyrical volume that alternates tenderness, irony, and moral urgency across domestic, religious, and public scenes.

THE JUSTICE OF THE PEACE.

Distinguish carefully between these two,

This thing is yours, that other thing is mine.

You have a shirt, a brimless hat, a shoe

And half a coat. I am the Lord benign

Of fifty hundred acres of fat land

To which I have a right. You understand?

I have a right because I have, because,

Because I have—because I have a right.

Now be quite calm and good, obey the laws,

Remember your low station, do not fight

Against the goad, because, you know, it pricks

Whenever the uncleanly demos kicks.

I do not envy you your hat, your shoe.

Why should you envy me my small estate?

It’s fearfully illogical in you

To fight with economic force and fate.

Moreover, I have got the upper hand,

And mean to keep it. Do you understand?