An anarchist poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 -1822)

An excerpt from The Mask of Anarchy:

What is Freedom? - ye can tell
what slavery is, all too well -
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.
It is to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
'So that ye for them are made
Loom, and plough, and sword, and spade,
With or without your own will bent,
For their defence and nourishment.
It is to see your children weak
With their mothers pine and peak,
When the winter winds are bleak, -
They are dying as I speak.
It is to hunger for such diet
As the rich man in his riot
Casts to the fat dogs that lie
Surfeiting beneath his eye;
It is to let the Ghost of Gold
Take from Toil a thousandfold
More that ever its substance could
In the tyrannies of old.
It is to be a slave in soul
And to hold no strong control
Over your own wills, but be
All that others make of thee
Let a great Assembly be
Of the fearless and the free
On some spot of English ground
Where the plains stretch wide around.
From the workhouse and the prison
As corpses newly risen,
Women, children, young and old
who Groan for pain, and weep for cold
'Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that thee
Are, as God has made thee, free -
And these words shall then become
Like Oppression's thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again - again - again -
'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.'