Power, Politics & Protest
Power, Politics & Protest — Overview
These three poems use poetry as a vehicle for political critique, spanning from the Romantic era to the present day. Shelley attacks a corrupt monarchy, Eliot exposes the suffocating conformity of Victorian urban life, and shamshad khan speaks to a looted African pot in a British museum. Each poet demonstrates that poetry can be a powerful form of protest.
Percy Bysshe Shelley — “England in 1819”
This sonnet is a furious catalogue of everything wrong with England in 1819: a mad, dying king (George III), corrupt princes, a starving populace, an army that massacres its own people, unjust laws, and a complicit church. Shelley wrote it in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre, when cavalry charged a peaceful crowd demanding parliamentary reform.
The poem’s structure is a single breathless sentence, building a list of grievances that culminates in a volta (turn) offering hope. After cataloguing corruption, Shelley concludes that these injustices are “graves” from which “a glorious Phantom may burst.” This phantom is revolution — Shelley believed that extreme oppression would inevitably produce radical change.
Shelley wrote “England in 1819” after the Peterloo Massacre. The poem lists England’s corruptions (monarchy, church, army, law) as “graves” from which revolution will rise. The sonnet form — traditionally used for love poetry — is repurposed as a weapon of political attack.
Key techniques: Shelley uses the sonnet form subversively (a love poem form for political rage), accumulation (listing grievances to overwhelm), violent imagery (“blood”, “mud”, “leech”), and a dramatic volta that transforms despair into revolutionary hope.
Context: Shelley was a radical who believed in republican government and the overthrow of monarchy. He left England for Italy in 1818 and never returned. The poem was not published until 1839, seventeen years after his death, because its content was considered seditious.
George Eliot — “In a London Drawingroom”
Mary Ann Evans, writing as George Eliot, describes the view from a London drawing room window: a grey, oppressive cityscape that seems to drain life and colour from everything. The poem critiques not a specific political event but the entire atmosphere of Victorian urban existence — its uniformity, its suppression of individuality, its spiritual deadness.
Eliot watches the people below “hurry on & look upon the ground” and “glance unmarking at the passers by” — anonymous figures in a colourless world. The drawing room itself becomes a symbol of middle-class entrapment: comfortable but confining, offering a view of the world but no genuine engagement with it. The speaker watches but cannot participate — trapped behind glass.
Eliot’s poem works on two levels: literally, it describes a grey London day; symbolically, it critiques a society that has traded vitality for respectability. The pathetic fallacy of the grey sky mirrors the emotional and spiritual greyness of Victorian conformity. The “drawingroom” represents the gilded cage of bourgeois life.
Context: Eliot published under a male pseudonym partly to escape the limitations placed on women writers. Her poem subtly critiques the domestic sphere she was expected to inhabit — the drawing room is literally and figuratively a woman’s prison in Victorian society.
shamshad khan — “pot”
khan is a second-generation British Asian poet from Manchester. The poem was commissioned for the city’s museum and is written as a conversation with a Nigerian pot in its collection. The pot is a symbol that works on many levels: a looted object, a prisoner behind glass, and a person of migrant heritage told “you’re not really one of us”.
The poem asks how the pot got here. Lines 12–22 offer story after story — it was “bought”, it was “lost”, it “must have slipped onto” a white boat to England — and the repeated “or / did they say” makes every version sound like an excuse. The speaker wants to “shatter” the display glass and send it home.
khan’s “pot” is political without ever raising its voice. It argues for cultural repatriation — returning looted objects — and links the pot to people of migrant heritage, and to prisoners held without charge, as at Guantanamo Bay when the poem appeared in 2007. This is quieter protest than Shelley’s rage, but equally political.
Key techniques: khan uses an everyday object as a vehicle for complex ideas, anaphora and short single-line stanzas, and free verse with no fixed stanza pattern. The closing questions — “pot? / pot?” — leave a silence for the reader to fill.
Connections Between the Poems
These three poems represent different modes of political poetry. Shelley is overtly revolutionary — naming specific targets and calling for their overthrow. Eliot is covertly critical — using description to imply a damning judgement on society. khan works through direct address — speaking to a museum object to expose how it was taken and why it has not gone home.
Each poet demonstrates a different strategy for political poetry. Shelley uses direct attack: naming the enemy and prophesying their fall. Eliot uses description as critique: showing the deadening effects of the system without explicitly condemning it. khan uses direct address: giving a museum object a voice and asking it to answer. These strategies reflect their different contexts — a Romantic revolutionary, a Victorian woman writing under a pseudonym, and a British Asian poet writing about what empire left behind.
All three share a concern with confinement: Shelley’s England is trapped under corrupt rulers; Eliot’s speaker is trapped in a drawing room; khan’s pot is trapped behind museum glass. The poems ask: what must be broken to achieve freedom?