The New Satanic Mills

by Paul Martin Freeman (February 2025)

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Whatever’s happened to that scepter’d isle,
That earth of majesty, that seat of Mars,
Where aged veterans were wont to smile
And strip their sleeves and proudly show their scars?
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Whatever’s happened to that happy breed
That happily for her would go to war;
Relinquish dearest life for England’s need
And blaze in deathless glory evermore?
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Whatever’s happened to that liberty
For which they struggled for a thousand years,
Defending it from foreign tyranny
And paying the price in blood and toil and tears?
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Has all that richness gone, that precious treasure,
To be by empty nothingness replaced?
Oh, England! shamed you are by us forever,
While we ourselves are shamefully disgraced.
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For what is left when governments conspire
Against the people in whose name they rule;
Force-feed their cities, towns and every shire
And choke their every hospital and school?
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And what survives when girls are sacrificed
Upon diversity’s ignoble altar,
When right and decency are compromised
Protecting not assaulted but assaulter?
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And what remains when merely outraged words
Are reason to remove that liberty
As law its loins with haste indecent girds
To serve not justice but authority?
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For such is now our broken throne of kings
That for the crown of nations once would vie
But suffering such outrageous fortune’s slings
Seems every day a little more to die.
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The wombs of English girls contain our future
While in them lives our nation’s teeming past
And when we fear to challenge the abuser
All Heaven stands affronted and aghast.
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And when so vilely we betray our daughters
And to their piteous cries are stony deaf
We surely plumb the most unholy waters
And tell the world of kingly England’s death.
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And just as nothing palpably displays
The dying of a nation’s noble pride
Or demonstrates a terminal malaise
As when for its defence it won’t provide;
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So nothing surer manifests decay
Or shows it spiralling downwards uncontrolled
Than when for votes its leaders give away
Its finest treasures far surpassing gold.
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And could there be a villainy to equal
The cynical betrayal of children here
When guardians of the law consort with evil
Or pockets fat with cash its victims smear?
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And who will say that dark Satanic Mills
Have not arisen again in English towns,
In ugly blots across our northern hills,
Where something hellish now the landscape crowns?
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Yet not the factories of a bygone age
Against whose soullessness would poets rail,
But dens of foul imported hate and rage
And gang rape on a vast industrial scale.
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And this is now that land for which they fought
Whose dust forever rests in foreign fields,
Whose love of country was so fiercely wrought
Still undiminished is the power it wields.
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Or dare we think that England’s spirit lives
And only sleeps within the breasts of men;
That faithless is the heart which thus misgives
And thinks this England will not rise again?
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That such an aberration cannot stand
Where God and Nature from themselves are turned
As in our erstwhile green and pleasant land
With all the majesty of England spurned?
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And dare we hope that this is just a phase
Through which all nations sometimes have to pass;
That England will again the world amaze
And from the flames emerge like tempered brass?
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For nothing can contain the will for freedom
Which tumbles in a fury like a flood,
As all in Nature has a time and season,
A time for lawfulness and time for blood;
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While all is willed within the womb of time
Where England might restore her broken soul;
Cast out this criminality and crime
And be again an undivided whole.
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For so she must, and so we must believe,
Though how or when is not for us to know.
Till then, for England must the English grieve
And hold themselves in readiness to go.
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