POINTS FROM CLEOPATRA: needing an expert. (Have very few reference books here.)

page 14. suitable name for an alexandrian nurse.

" I8. Brother and Sister marriage. Was it common among the primitive Macedonian ? -- as well as in Egypt ?

" I9. confarratio -- the most binding form of Roman marriage ?

" 62. Cleopatra Lagos: could she call herself that? Should it be Lagidon or

" 38. The light from the Pharos. How far did it show out to sea.
Find I've two notes: 30 miles and 86 70!

2 93. Dates ?

" I44. Name for a common Roman slave.

" I47. Were chickens a home oracle? Or only military or at important temples?

" I54. The Epigonoi -- successors of Alexander. Can't remember the right word.

" I76. Har-par-crat ? Correct?

" I78. Name for an Egyptian girl, correspondant of Charmian.

" 208. Greek equivalent for Latin 'Evoe'. ( Io Paian?)

" 222. Mena -- suitable name for an egyptian sea-captain?

" 257. Houses -- say in Egypt -- already built of lathe and plaster ?

2 265. I8th March what Latin date? (Can't be quite sure I've got it right.)

" 267. Atys ? Had the worship of the Great Mother already arrived in Rome?

" 296. 'Mistress that loves the heights of ? and Idalium' -- beginning of that Idyll of Theocritus on the Syracusan women. I've

forgotten the number, but the Hymn begins like that. Is the first
namw name Kolchis?

page 336. Plural of the Marcus Antonius' gens. Antonii or can one
say the Antonines?

page 347. Did Antony call himself Triumvir? Or just Consul?

who listened to the many voices blown, distracted,
birdcries out of the thicket of blood-darkness,
and answered awry, glamoured by dark phrases,
the slaughtered Lamb, the flayed carcass of their lives,
the unremitting call to follow truth,
to follow a bond denying their present slavery,
broken by harsh echoes from the unploughed thicket.
Come, you Anabaptists and you Levellers,
come, you Muggletonians, all you Bedlamites,
fall in behind us, you are not English, comrades.

Come, you Luddites, come you men of the Charter,
singing your songs of defiance on the blackened hills,
invoking the storm, the whirlwind, being surer now,
deciphering at last the certain earth behind
the many voices confusing the moonstruck mind.
Come from the mines and the looms, come from the ploughlands,
come and tramp the streets of Birmingham and London,
the dragoons are waiting to split your skulls, my comrades,
for you are not English, you angry millions, you workers,
your voice snarls in the ling of the flaring foundry,
your voice rips louder than raven-caws at the morning,
you are speaking out and you were not meant to speak,
you are waking, comrades,
you are not English now,
your ruling-class has said it.
You spoke at Glasgow and the Clyde when terrorism
was chaining all men in the roaring jail of war;
you will speak louder yet.
It came, the first full-throated shout of your purpose
in 1926, in the General Strike.
Pickets against police, the new order against the old,
Councils of Action against the State of the thieves.
There was laughter despite hunger, life blossomed with meaning
amid the red rust and the deserts of slag,
and brotherhood woke with new clearness from the act of your union.
You were defeated by your wavering leaders,
the purpose was driven down, to breed greater strength in your depths.

Stand out one of the men who were not English,
come, William Morris,
you that preached armed revolt to the workers and said
of the men who died for us in the Commune of Paris :
*We honour them as the foundation-stone*
*of the new world that is to be.*
You that cried out after Bloody Sunday :
*Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay,*
*but one and all if they would dusk the day!*

5

And stand out, you the unknown weaver,
who wrote in the *Poor Man's Guardian* of 1832,
before Marx had shown us how the thefts were made :
*The profit is that which is retained and never paid back.*
*There is no common interest*
*between working-men and profit-makers.*

You were not English, we are not English either—
though we have loved these trees plumed upon the sunset
and turned back to the area-rails our prison-bars;
though we have followed the plough like a hungry rook,
with love for the brown soil slicing fatly away,
to haunt in the end the dingy rain of the street
where a prosperous spilth of warming music
trickled through drawn blinds on our beggar-senses;
though we have crept into the daisy-light of the dew
to wake once more in the dripping tenements;
though we have plucked hazelnuts in the lane of autumn,
making faces at the squirrel, to kiss between laughters,
that was not our land, we were trespassers,
the field of toil was our allotted life,
beyond it we might not stir though blossom-scents
left tender trails leading to the heart of summer;
though we have loved this earth where our sweat and our tears
drained through the thankless centuries, though we lay
long nights of agony digging our fingers deep
in the wet earth, yet the bailiffs evicted us,
it was all taken away, England was taken,
what little of it was ours in desperate toil
was taken, and the desperate toil remained,
and lanes of dank gloom where the echo of midnight falls,
a late wayfarer stumbling, leaving nothing behind
except the gaslight coughing and the crying child,
milk turned sour in the thunder-hour awaiting,
queues at the Labour Exchange while the radio squeals
in the shop nearby, and nothing remains, nothing
except the mad-faces forming from the damp-stains on the plaster,
the scabs of sickness and the jagged edge
of tins in the bucket, and the knock on the door,
and the child crying and the bug-heats, hunger,
and the child crying,
and the radio-message through crevices of the dark silence,
*Workers of the World* . . .
Listen, hold up your head, it wasn't the rat
whisking under the coal-scuttle, it wasn't the lodger
stealing back scared from the woman under the bridge.
In this hour even the flower-lips speak. It is
the augural moment declared by frenetic guesses,

6

come clear at last. The moon-slit whispers, the rafter
creaks to a new pulse stirring, the bough of silence
cracks with a quick decision, men softly creeping
through forests of hardship to surprise the drunken castle.

Lift up your head,
listen, you Rhondda miners, you Durham miners,
the radio-voice is seeping through the barriers,
*Workers of the World* . . .

They are awake at Bleanleachan, men are stirring,
reaching out their hands, the moon sets in the coal-tip,
the fans of the air-shaft whirr like a giant breathing.

Come, changelings of poverty, cheated of the earth,
Albion or Land of Brut or Avalon,

Coal-ghetto that was once the Isle of Apples,
call it what you will, there must be in it

Soviet Republic.

England, my England—
the words are clear

*Workers of the World, unite!*

The voice comes pealing through the trumpet of the night,
*You have nothing to lose but your chains!*

The sunlight breaks
like waves on a shingly beach, sweeping the mountains
with more than the sough of pines.

This morning is of men as well as light,
its unity is born from the sweat of mingled toil,
it springs from the earth of action, it is ours
and England. We who made it, we are making
another England, and the loyalty learned
in mine and factory begets our truth,

this compact linking us to past and future.

The workers take the world that they have made!
unseal the horns of plenty, join once more
the severed ends of work and play; and if the thieves
challenge our coming, we have learned the might
of sledges falling, the turbine's fury, the craft
of dynamos winding energy from the elements.

In vain they turn their guns and poison gas
on those for whom electricity rears its unseen fortress,
the sun drops shrapnel of light upon their ranks
but feeds our renewed bodies; the womb of earth
cries for our seed. No others have the thews
to make this earth, this England, breed to her desire.

The disinherited are restored, our mother,
England, our England,
England, our own.

7

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