The Poetry Corner

Vos Deos Laudamus: The Conservative Journalists Anthem

By Algernon Charles Swinburne

As a matter of fact, no man living, or who ever lived, not Csar or Pericles, not Shakespeare or Michael Angelo, could confer honour more than he took on entering the House of Lords. - Saturday Review, December 15, 1883. Clumsy and shallow snobbery can do no hurt. - Ibid. I. O Lords our Gods, beneficent, sublime, In the evening, and before the morning flames, We praise, we bless, we magnify your names. The slave is he that serves not; his the crime And shame, who hails not as the crown of Time That House wherein the all-envious world acclaims Such glory that the reflex of it shames All crowns bestowed of men for prose or rhyme. The serf, the cur, the sycophant is he Who feels no cringing motion twitch his knee When from a height too high for Shakespeare nods The wearer of a higher than Miltons crown. Stoop, Chaucer, stoop: Keats, Shelley, Burns, bow down: These have no part with you, O Lords our Gods. II. O Lords our Gods, it is not that ye sit Serene above the thunder, and exempt From strife of tongues and casualties that tempt Men merely found by proof of manhood fit For service of their fellows: this is it Which sets you past the reach of Times attempt, Which gives us right of justified contempt For commonwealths built up by mere mens wit: That gold unlocks not, nor may flatteries ope, The portals of your heaven; that none may hope With you to watch how life beneath you plods, Save for high service given, high duty done; That never was your rank ignobly won: For this we give you praise, O Lords our Gods. III. O Lords our Gods, the times are evil: you Redeem the time, because of evil days. While abject souls in servitude of praise Bow down to heads untitled, and the crew Whose honour dwells but in the deeds they do, From loftier hearts your nobler servants raise More manful salutation: yours are bays That not the dawns plebeian pearls bedew; Yours, laurels plucked not of such hands as wove Old age its chaplet in Colonos grove. Our time, with heaven and with itself at odds, Makes all lands else as seas that seethe and boil; But yours are yet the corn and wine and oil, And yours our worship yet, O Lords our Gods.