Francis Bennion - Poetry - Poemotions

Some impudent persons presume
to add new words, new usages, to our gracious English language
which already has all the linguistics England needs:
all the lit-bits we Anglo-Saxons require for civility,
to live in tranquillity
in our very own English way.

Away from the world we manage to live,
hidden quietly, snugly behind English hills.
Deprecatingly, with other English people, beside our flowing rivers,
we old and knowing English people,
tracing back a thousand or more years
live in our very own English way.

The English language is known to have a rich vocabulary: so why don't you leave it alone?
For God's sake, leave it alone - and get thee gone!

Impudent persons object to our snugness, calling it smugness,
and project on us their invented words:
striving by force of language to change our English ways.
Language, they impudently say, is powerful:
it will push us out of our English ways, they think -
and so it will, if we let it.

Start of page 106 in the book

Language indeed is powerful,
that there's no denying:
if we doubted, the proof is in the wicked new word racist.
O what a wicked word that is
to be thrust by impudent persons
into our proud and decorous English language!

The English language is known to have a rich vocabulary: so why don't you leave it alone?
For God's sake use your brains - and let us be!

Racist - meaning whatever you want it to mean -
is filled to overspill with illwill, and the venomous will to kill.
The will to kill possesses these impudent intruders
who hate what we English love
and long to pull down our defences with new words,
spew words - and in our own country too!

Language indeed is powerful,
there's no denying that:
if we doubted, the proof is in the wicked new word sexist.
O what a wicked word that is
to be thrust by impudent persons
into our proud and decorous English language!

The English language is known to have a rich vocabulary: so why don't you leave it alone?
For God's sake, leave it alone - and do your own thing!

Sexist - meaning the overturn of male chivalry,
the death of delight in femininity and womanly wiles,
the sad end of motherliness and the saint in the kitchen
we all loved to rush home to from school.
They would slay the noble housewife for the sake of the officious office girl
who must have it all.

Start of page 107 in the book

So let we English be bold, and reject
the sneaky new words injected by impudent persons
into our splendid English language.
In future I for one will simply not recognise
any use of bastard neologisms like racist and sexist.
They were not needed when I was a boy - so why are they needed now?

The English language is known to have a rich vocabulary: so why don't you leave it alone?
For God's sake, leave it alone - and get lost!

Start of page 108 in the book

In 2002 I Am Dismayed

As a mature true Englishman I am flabbergasted (I refuse to say gobsmacked)
at what our so-called English are up to
in Anno Domini (the year of our Lord) Two Thousand and Two.

Many English from whom we now suffer say they are educated
so should have known better
if current education did its job - or even existed.

If that necessary education had served its purpose
there should be swarms of enthusiastic English
determined to beat off the multicultural, anti-English mob.

But where are these swarms? What on earth has become of them?
Which potentate emasculated them and drained their brains?
In which hideout now lurk the pathetic creeping Anglo-Saxons, once so heroic?

I expected much, believing those warriors magnificent.
Now the effete creeps lurk in corners, praising everyone else,
bending low, apologising for being English.

So I am dismayed, I might even say stricken,
having been brought up to be outspoken, like others -
a brave outspoken Englishman, challenging the world.

I never thought to find that when challenged
today's English would throw in the towel
meekly disavowing their glorious past, begging everyone's pardon.

Dimly, dismally begging pardon; it's not what I'm used to,
not at all what I was brought up to.
As an old-fashioned Englishman; I'm finally forced to say I'm gobsmacked.

Start of page 109 in the book

Song of the Horrible, Horrible Racist

O I am a horrible, horrible racist
you'd shoot me if you could
you being liberally whiter than white
and I so misunderstood

You are whiter than white - and yet
you simply adore the blacks
I think seeing the world like that
is just a little bit lax

It's just a little bit lax, my dear
(how I love you so!)
because there are these differences
and all of them you know

I'd rather adore my own dear folk
while sadly enduring the tax
levied by you lax liberals
on our uncomplaining backs

The tax I mean which shines the sheen
of the Ashanti queen, and her Vizier:
which he shuffles into his bank accounts
in far off Switzy Land

I'm bound to die a horrible, horrible death
but will think, as I waft away,
if that's what they mean by racism
I'd rather stay home and play

Start of page 110 in the book

Olé, hurray, hip hip hurray
if that's what they mean by racism
I'd rather stay home and play, dear folks
If it's OK - by you, and the rest

Even if it's not OK
still I'd rather stay home
with all my Anglo-Saxon folk
stay home with them and play

For we do know how to play, you know.
We play at history, and mystery,
and poetry, and oratory,
through the realms of our own philosophy

It's an old philosophy, you know
going beyond the Greeks.
Our clever professors have worked on it
for many centuries

I've studied what they have to say
I'd learn it if I could:
but still I do my best, hooray!
although misunderstood

O I am a horrible, horrible racist
you'd shoot me if you could
you being liberally whiter than white
and I so misunderstood

Start of page 111 in the book

Differences in Attitudes

Why has the passing of just a few years produced such differences in attitudes?
For example, there has been an unwarranted revolution as to body servants.
In 1920 the Earl my grandfather employed a valet (pronounced valett) as his body servant.
Such retainers were old news in the Earl's family, stale news:
the noble body's stalenesses were what these menials were required to remove.
It was an everyday job that needed to be performed by somebody:
one couldn't have Earls dealing with their own body's effluents, or having to dress themselves:
menials had to be employed to do all that; no one thought otherwise.
That was the attitude one had in those days;
along with a plentiful supply of the said menials.

In 1920 menials, and plenty of them, were regarded as essential to civilised living.
There was nothing new in that attitude; it had been going on for centuries.
My grandfather the Earl then had on his payroll not only a valet or valets (successors to varlets),
but a butler, housekeeper, half a dozen footmen, and a score of maids -
not to speak of innumerable outside servants, as they were called on the estate,
together with his steward, employed to hold everything together,
and also his man of affairs the family solicitor, squatting in a dark office in Lincoln's Inn.
The attitude then was that all this waiting-on was natural and desirable:
people felt it held the country together -
and anyway had been going on for generations, so must be right.

Start of page 112 in the book

Today, less than a century later, attitudes are altogether different - I can't think why.
Why should the passing of a few years produce such differences in attitudes?
Right and wrong don't change, so why should all that?
I have tried, but still can't get, a decent valet.
My friends guffaw, not thinking a man needs a valet today.
I find this attitude extremely difficult to understand:
it strikes me as obtuse and unfeeling.
I can't see that any external force has changed what we all used to think right
when it came to the need a civilised man obviously has
for at the very least one body servant.