by Chesterton · Cluster: Essay · Critique of Progress · Common Man
Abstract
A short epigrammatic poem reversing Goldsmith’s line on wealth and decaying men, indicting industrial commerce: now ‘Men accumulate and Wealth decay’. Themes of social injustice, the decay of the common man, and a prophetic note of judgment.
Testo / Text
Connections
Settings: Industrial City
Topoi: World Upside Down, Poet as Prophet
Motifs: Money and Gold, Decay Themes & Concepts: Social Injustice, Anti-Industrialism, Common Man, Critique of Progress, Apocalypse, Greed and Money, Economics Forms & Genres: Epigram, Lyric, Satire Historical References: Industrial Revolution, Oliver Goldsmith
Testo integrale / Full text
The Judgment Of England
“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey
Where Wealth accumulates and Men decay.”
So rang of old the noble voice in vain
O’er the Last Peasants wandering on the plain,
Doom has reversed the riddle and the rhyme,
While sinks the commerce reared upon that crime,
The thriftless towns litter with lives undone,
To whom our madness left no joy but one;
And irony that glares like Judgment Day
Sees Men accumulate and Wealth decay.