Timely poem sent in by Houston CPUSA club member, Dafydd
Rise like lions after a slumber
In unvanquishable number.
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many-
They are few.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822)was a major english romantic poet. After his death he became an idol of the next three or four generations of poets, including important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets. He was admired by Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, William Butler Yeats, Upton Sinclair and Isadora Duncan. Henry David Thoreau’s civil disobedience and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s passive resistance were apparently influenced and inspired by Shelley’s non-violence in protest and political action, although Gandhi does not include him in his list of mentors.