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 The
large mass of poetry is written by people from the educated classes:
what in England would have been called the upper middle classes.
As I have discussed earlier, the qualities of poetry involve considerable
vocabularies, and a sense of parameters such as meter, cadence,
internal structure, and so forth. Take a working-class child, educate
it, and you produce an aesthete!
What one might regard as 'true' working class poetry is less common,
although there is much working class song: a great deal of the work
of Johnny Cash, for example, discusses the problems of the lower
strata of society. We will return to this later.
This means that there is a large class of issues that are not
addressed by poets to any great extent. Often, the problems are
treated in terms of the middle or upper class user:
Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: and serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.
Hilaire
Belloc (1870-1953)
And, a couple of weeks ago I used a poem by Robert Frost, Two
Tramps in Mud Time, which included the similar thought:
I had no right to play
With what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right - agreed.
Some
workmen had an aura, which made them objects of the poet, notably
blacksmiths: here is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) in The
Village Blacksmith (1842):
The smith a mighty man is he
With large and sinewy hands.
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate'er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.
 However,
returning to the true issues facing labor, George Davis (1930's)
wrote the following, based on the problems of a coal miner in the
industry of the time. The actual money that the owner of the coal
mine made from the coal was quite small, so they organized a local
store: the miners were forced in various ways to use the company
store for all their needs, with the result that they were trapped
by an economic device into what was, to all intents and purposes,
slavery. John McBride, president of the United Mine Workers of America
(1892-1894), related how an Ohio coal operator of his acquaintance
worked two mines for thirteen months and made a profit of only $287.
During the same period his store, which without the mines would
have been worth nothing, earned him a net profit of $22,000!
I loaded sixteen tons and what do I get
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter don't call me cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store.
Well I got up one morning, the sun didn't shine,
I picked up my shovel and I went to the mine,
I loaded sixteen ton of that number four coal
The face boss said, ''Well bless my soul!"
I loaded sixteen tons, I tried to get ahead,
Got deeper and deeper in debt instead.
Well they got what I made, and they wanted some more,
And now I owe my soul at the company store.
There
is more of this. Davis always felt that Merle
Travis had stolen this work from him for his very successful song;
but of course opinions differ.
 Robert
William Service (1874-1958) was perhaps close in the early part
of his life to being a 'working class poet', although his general
background was middle-class. He emigrated from Preston, in north-west
England, to Canada in 1894, and lived for eight years in the Yukon.
(This is actually a considerable oversimplification of his biography!)
His poems The Shooting
of Dan McGrew and The Cremation of Sam McGee were
very popular. However, the poem from this period that nearest fits
our theme this week is The Song of the Wage Slave, and this
will be one of our poems of the week.
I suppose that the plowman (ploughman in English) is an example
of the working-class person admired by the essentially middle
class poet: here is Thomas Gray's (1716-1771) image from Elegy
in a Country Churchyard:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
And
Milton (1608-1674) in L'Allegro:
The ploughman near at hand,
Whistles o'er the furrowed land,
And the milkmaid singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his scythe,
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale.
This
last, though, is typical of the 'bucolic paradise' kind of writing,
which does not address the true issues of the working class!
Of course, the most famous poem relating to a plowman is The
Vision of Piers Plowman, written by William Langland (approximately
1330-1400), of whom little is known. I will not try to extract a
quote from this: I always find it difficult to 'deobscure' the text
in any meaningful way - certainly my failure, not the poem's!
However, most working-class poetry, like Sixteen Tons,
has generally been sung. Of course, the archetype of this is The
Red Flag, which was written by
Jim Connell (1852-1929) in 1889, originally to be sung to
the tune "The White Cockade" (no, I don't know it!) although (as
we know) it is more commonly sung to "Die Tannenbaum". Connell
was born in Kilskyre in County Meath (Ireland), and having been
blacklisted as a casual docker in Dublin for trying to unionize
the docks, moved to London in 1875. He wrote the song on the train
from Charing Cross to New Cross after attending a lecture on socialism
at a meeting of the Social Democratic Federation. It was inspired
by the London dock strike happening at that time.
The people's flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts' blood dyed its every fold.
Then raise the scarlet standard high! (chorus)
Within its shade we'll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We'll keep the Red Flag flying here.
The
last verse is:
With heads uncovered swear we all
To bear it onward till we fall;
Come dungeons dark or gallows grim,
This song shall be our parting hymn.
This
song has been used as, in effect, an anthem by all sorts of socialist,
democratic socialist, and labor union groups ever since. It was
sung by the British Labour Party members of Parliament as they took
power following the election immediately following the second world
war.
I was playing at a strikers' demonstration at a supermarket a couple
of years ago, and one of the activists asked me if I knew any labor
songs. I confessed to my ignorance, and she found a paperback entitled
Songs for Labor, published by the American Federation of
Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations. I am going to use
the text of two of these as the other poems for this week - thanks,
Rosylin!
 I
have selected I don't want your millions, mister by Jim
Garland, and Bread and Roses, by James Oppenheim. This
was inspired by the New
England textile strikes of 1912, and has been described as
'an anthem to women's rights'. (Find out more about this important
moment in American labor history here.)
I am aware that there have also been considerable amounts of politically
motivated poetry written. In Liverpool (England) at about the same
time the Beatles were beginning there were a number of active poetry
groups, usually meeting in pubs (of course!), and I am sure the
same was true in many big cities elsewhere, where much of the poetry
was of this type. I haven't been able to put my hands on examples,
but I'd be interested in receiving information about it and accessible
sources.
Workers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing To Lose But Your
Iambic Pentameters!
The
Song of the Wage Slave
I
don't want your millions, mister
Bread
and Roses
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