Now Listen To Me And Ill Tell You My Views - Analysis

A poem that weaponizes the word shriek

The central move of Paterson’s poem is to speak in the voice of a loud, “patriotic” commentator and then quietly let that voice condemn itself. The speaker claims he will tell you my views on the African war, but his “views” are mostly a set of ready-made yells: denunciations, cheers, and slogans. The repeated command to shriek becomes the poem’s moral diagnosis. It suggests a public culture that can only keep its certainty alive by making noise—because silence might let in thought, and thought might let in doubt.

The enforced binary: agree or be Pro-Boer

Right away, the speaker sets up a bullying logic: anyone with different views is a ritten Pro-Boer. That phrase is comic in its misspelling and childishness, but it’s also sinister: it shows how debate is being reduced to name-calling. The parenthetical aside—I’m getting a little bit doubtful—is crucial because it reveals what the shriek is for. The poem’s first real tension is already present: the speaker is not fully convinced, yet he recommends not ask any questions and instead to silence all doubts. Paterson makes the “patriot” admit that the volume is compensating for uncertainty.

Safe cruelty: insulting old men from a distance

When the speaker imitates the Tory Press in calling De Wet a madman, Steyn a liar, and Kruger a pitiful cur, the poem turns the spotlight on how easy contempt is when it costs nothing. The speaker then undercuts his own abuse by imagining Oom Paul walking down the Strand with his gun, prompting the “heroes” to hide in the sewers. The insult is revealed as cowardly theater: Kruger is mocked precisely because he is now feeble and weak, lonely, and old and grey. Paterson’s satire sharpens here: the shriek thrives on targets who can’t answer back.

Hooray for arson: the war celebrated as spectacle

The poem’s darkest section is the cheer for Kitchener’s bag—a word that turns human capture into sport. The speaker’s “Hooray” slides into an inventory of state violence: the fireman’s torch and the hangman’s cord displayed as if they were decorations hung on the English Flag. Paterson forces the reader to look where propaganda tries not to: the farmhouse blazes, women weep, and children die, followed immediately by the grotesque scolding: how dare they presume to fight. The contradiction is brutal—civilians are punished, then blamed for resisting. Even the complaint about uniforms (none of them dress properly) is exposed as moral nonsense: the Boers’ “crime” is not looking like a conventional army, and yet the speaker’s side uses that as cover for disproportionate retaliation.

The poem’s key turn: the asides that tell the truth

Paterson builds a double-voiced speaker: the public voice shouts, while the parenthetical voice keeps leaking reality. The aside about captured troops—they’re catching them every week—admits the war is not going as triumphantly as the shriek suggests. Worse, the speaker concedes the shame is ours, but instantly retreats into noise: we cover the shame with a shriek. This is the poem’s hinge. It stops being only an attack on political opponents or newspapers and becomes an attack on a psychological habit: whenever facts threaten national self-image, the culture chooses volume over responsibility.

Politics as panic: Birmingham Judas and the Grocers

In the closing passage, the “shriek” becomes explicitly political—as we sit in the dark and doubt. The speaker’s panic looks for traitors and saviors: a Birmingham Judas who led them in, and the hope that Rosebery will speak like an Oracle. But the “Oracle” answers with humiliating banality: You go to the Grocers for your laws. The line lands as a final insult to the idea of noble leadership; decisions are outsourced to commerce, party machinery, and crowd emotion. The poem ends where it began—it’s time to shriek—but now that refrain reads less like confidence than like desperation, a society trying to drown out its own dawning recognition of what it is cheering for.