Inoculation

How is it that we, in this fine isle,
Have been granted our quiet inoculation?
A stubborn, unmerited bloom of liberty,
That rising buttress from an English meadow?
To rest in our selfishness, yet glimpse such joy
We know We never earned.

A lover’s glance across the pews at matins,
Soft wind stirring the ancient oak that has stood
Since Saxon moots first gathered beneath its boughs,
Simple as our first timber chapels, humble and hand-hewn.

Had we become the test, set against the paradigm
Of iron creeds and certain empires,
And they, against us?

Moments tapped out through centuries of mist and rain,
Where freemen spoke and kings were gently bound
By custom’s quiet hand. Normans stormed with sword and motte,
Raising heavy Romanesque pillars from Caen,
Yet could not break us, could not twist the common law
That holds all equal before its blind, eternal gaze,
Our batter of equality, tested and true,
Supporting the vault without crushing the nave.

I see you, England, my heart’s slow flame,
The thought of you at dawn, when sleep-brushed eyes
Open on an empty pillow of near forgotten glory;

Drake’s drum still echoes across the Main,
Reformation’s fire warms the freeborn Englishman;
Glorious Revolution’s gentle thunder rolls
A summer rain on thatched roofs and parish spires.

We muddle through with empiric grace,
Smith and Hume whisper as Alban larks,
Wilkes cries freedom of speech from the rooftops of London’s soul.
Sir Edward Coke, Langton at Runnymede,

The blood of English martyrs soft crescendo at evensong;
William Cuffay, Cobden, Bright, Voices clear as church bells
Across the meadows. As the factory whistle at dusk

Roast beef of Old England on the oaken table,
Satire’s merry blade flashing, sunlight on the brook;
Hogarth, waspish Gilray, Cruikshank.
Shakespeare holds up his mirror to the human heart,
That Book of Common Prayer and the King James’ tongue
Rolling like the mist through parish lanes and suburban gardens.
Wycliffe’s truth in plain words, Pankhurst’s banner fluttering.

Churchill’s growl, Monty’s steady tread,
Rodney, Hood and Nelson astride the quarterdeck at Pompey’s tide,

Austen’s quiet irony, Nightingale’s lamp in the dark.
Blake’s vision, searing, brave,
Purcell and Byrd, Elgar’s pregnant chords,
Elizabeth at Tilbury, steel wrapped in velvet;

Self-confidence without moral certainty,
Self-deprecation worn like an old tweed coat,
A bumbling shrug beneath the brim of history,
Wellington’s iron and Malborough’s logic,
The eccentric, the dreamer, the dreamed-of,
Wilberforce, Clarkson, Sharp, the Africa Squadron,
Shaftesbury, Factory Acts rising potent as Wesley’s hymns,
Smiles’ Self-help blooming wild in cottage plots and workshop yards.

England, our England, Aristotlian, not Platonic,
Whose empiric roots run deep
As the yew’s in the churchyard soil, knowledge born of sense and soil,
Of hand and eye and falling rain, not Plato’s distant ideals
Cast down from shadowed caves of abstract form.

And here the Enlightenment dawned not in grand salons
An orchard, an apple fell, plain, provable, true,
Gravity revealed in the grass, not decreed from on high;

The tabula rasa of Hobbes and Locke built on the Stagirite’s ancient wisdom,
Our cathedral of liberty rises not from heavenly archetype
But stone by tested stone, as masons learned from wind and weather.
Our freedoms were never won at varsity alone,
By those in white flannels on the college lawn;
Ragged trousers are also our tale,
Night schools glowing, candles in the dark,
Men and women learn without doffing caps,
They built the broached spire of liberty
Course by honest course.

Did we win first prize in the lottery of life?
Perhaps, just a quiet, undeserved grace,
Just tenure on this sacred ground.
This land we hold, not as freehold, but in lease,
We farmers of our moral soil,
Caring, tending the furrows of our inheritance,
Pass the living seed, hand to calloused hand,
Generation to generation, stewards only,
Feoffees of a patrimony not ours to squander.

While some, in their fashionable folly,
Believe the clock of time began with them alone.
And so the test rolls on.
And we, being we, modest, muddling, open,
Have passed before.

But fresh doors opening wide
To other gods and shiny new certainties.
There is goodness in our patrimony,
Goodness, in the end, we hope, will out.

Yet now I ask, do we still carry the cure
Coursing warm through our leasehold veins?
Or have we, in our foolishness, bound the physician,
Replaced him with a fairground quack?
Taught our children to scorn this great story,
Or not even taught at all?

Swapped this church of oak and stone and quiet sky,
For the gawdy trinkets of DEI and HR,
The panopticon with its non-crime hate,

The death of juries, two-tier justice,
Group rights that mock equality before the law?
We are open, we are decent, we are kind,
Hearts as wide as drovers lanes,
But we are toubled now, frustrated,

And we haven’t spoken yet.

We must free the doctor,
We must rescue him from the empathy of self harm,
Jenner-like inoculate ourselves once more.
We must revet against those whose moral certainty,
Whose ur-belief in their own rectitude,
Threatens everything we hold most dear.
We must sack the quack,

If we no longer share the same story,

How shall we stand when the forces, in and out
Come to strip us of what was never ours alone,
Not ours to give.
But a trust held for the generations?

How shall we rise, with that ancient inoculation
Still warm in our leasehold veins,
When the very physician who wielded it

Lies bound and muted in the square?