High Conspiratorial Person
High Conspiratorial Person - meaning Summary
Truth Wrung from History
The speaker confronts centuries of falsehood and corruption embodied in a soiled rag that has touched kings and cities. Official testimony and perjury are depicted as smeared and untrustworthy, yet from this filth the speaker hopes to extract a single honest, human revelation. The poem compresses historical injustice into a visceral image and ends with a yearning for one authentic, compassionate truth amid pervasive ritual deceit.
Read Complete AnalysesOUT of the testimony of such reluctant lips, out of the oaths and mouths of such scrupulous liars, out of perjurers whose hands swore by God to the white sun before all men, Out of a rag saturated with smears and smuts gathered from the footbaths of kings and the loin cloths of ****s, from the scabs of Babylon and Jerusalem to the scabs of London and New York, From such a rag that has wiped the secret sores of kings and overlords across the millenniums of human marches and babblings, From such a rag perhaps I shall wring one reluctant desperate drop of blood, one honest-to-God spot of red speaking a mother-heart.
December, 1918. Christiania, Norway.
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