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The Dominion of the Sword

by Anonymous

Note that this is more of a ballad than a poem but I'm rolling with it anyway.

I heard this from the excellent song of the same name by Martin Cathy which you can hear here. A fascinating thing is the original ballad was written in the 17th century and many of the lines in it reflect that while Martin Cathy wrote his version in the 1980s and used a few verses from the ballad and added some of his own. Even the updated song version by Martin Cathy is out of date in its own way, referencing South African Apartheid and the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior

An updated version of the song by the Melrose Quartet sung in 2017 has their own version of the lyrics which makes some updates. It makes the Rainbow Warrior reference into a more general point about eco warriors. It also adds a reference to warfare with drones and the missiles Hellfire /Trident

I'm not going to reproduce the entire ballad but I will add a few verses with annotations.

Small pow’r the word has,
And can afford us,
Not half so much priviledge as
The sword does.

This is talking about how the law or arguments only mean so much in the end; that violence ultimately rules the world. On a purely aesthetic level it's fascinating that privilege used to be spelt that way and they have an apostrophe in power for the e.

It fosters your masters,
It plaisters disasters,
It makes the servants quickly greater
Than their masters.

It talks of small things,
But it sets up all things;
This masters money, though money
Masters all things.

It is not season,
To talk of reason,
Nor call it loyalty, when the sword
Will have it treason.

A criticism of the original ballad I have is that it seems to be mourning the weakening of the crown and church's power as if it is just that their rule is ordained by God and this is simply as true as the sun rising from the East. it does perhaps mirror the typical English opinion as after their brief flirtation with republicanism they quickly reverted back to a monarchy.

References:

Footnotes

[0] - More like unknown than anonymous but I'm going with Wikisource's notation
[1] - This was the bombing of a Greenpeace ship by French spies in New Zealand in 1985 since the ship was protesting the French nuclear testing in the South Pacific.
[2] - Wikipedia link if you're curious but it's just a missile used for drone strikes
[3] - Wikipedia link to the missile but this can also refer to the nuclear programme that the UK maintains.
[4] - An obsolete version of plaster, i.e. covers up over
[5] - Note that this was written in the context around the English civil war when King Charles I was executed by his parliament so it had seemed that the "natural order" of the universe had been overturned.