Shelley today

Poet Paul Francis, commended in last year’s SMP poetry competition and runner up this year, reflects on his competition experience, Shelley’s legacy, and the power of poetry to swell the voice of protest.

Paul Francis

“Poetry should stay out of politics. And you should ditch iambic rhythm and rhymes. They were fine for four hundred years, but we’ve grown out of them now.”

I met that a lot, but I knew it wasn’t as simple as that. Adrian Mitchell railed against the obscenity of the Vietnam War, and Tony Harrison had poems about the Balkan atrocities on the front page of The Guardian.

Behind them was Blake. He didn’t leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions about what London was like. He thrust in front of them a vision, in potent imagery and short, tough lines, about the inhuman impact of power on the poor.

Above all, there was Shelley. Not the ethereal dreamer of “bird thou never wert”, which never appealed to me, but the outraged denunciation of Peterloo. How could you watch the murder of unarmed protestors and remain detached?

I met murder on the way
He had a mask like Castlereagh –

The rhymes aren’t mechanical box-ticking; they’re the active vehicle for accumulating rage.  

I’ve written sonnets for more than fifty years, and in the story of that form Ozymandias stands out as a beacon. The Shakespearean model suggests a series of lego blocks, 4 + 4 +4 +2; but with the pattern of his rhymes (ababa), and strong punctuation in the middle of the line, Shelley breaks that mould, turning the memorable block into a fluid fourteen-line entity, seething with potential.

When the Shelley Memorial competition for 2022 was announced I couldn’t resist. Memorial was a sonnet about Covid rituals, which borrowed the last line of Ozymandias. Highlights Reel took over the music and the anger of The Masque of Anarchy;

   Forget it. Since the Brexit farce
full Anarchy has come to pass.
Entitlement has claimed its place –
surprise! It’s wearing Johnson’s face.”

I was delighted to hear that both poems had been commended, and when the e-mail came this year asking last year’s entrants if they wanted to be involved again there was never any doubt. My poem this year, Agitation, is about three young activists arrested for blocking a road near Gatwick Airport, in order to prevent people from Brooke House immigration centre being forcibly removed to Jamaica. Like Shelley reading about Peterloo, they felt that something must be done, and the poem moves between them and the poet, stressing that connection.

I’m delighted that my poem won second prize, because it reinforces the faith shared by Shelley, those activists and me. We believe that protest against the abuse of power is not a symptom of immaturity, but a duty for us all.