Franz von Stuck, “The Guardian of Paradise,” 1889
4,413 words
Editor’s Note:
A. R. D. Fairburn was born on February 2, 1904. In commemoration, we are reprinting his magnificent poem “Dominion,” a panorama of the British Empire and his native New Zealand in the trammels of international finance capitalism. Fairburn was a follower of Nietzsche and Spengler and an advocate of Social Credit, the most common intellectual ingredients in the outlook of Anglophone fascists in the 1920s and ’30s.
Europe 1945
And now spring comes to the starved and blackened land
where the tailless abominable angel has spent his passion;
dead roots are twined through the bones of a broken hand;
now death, not Schiaparelli, sets the fashion.
In the twentieth century of the Christian era
the news-hawk camera man, no Botticelli,
walks on this stricken earth with Primavera,
and Europe cries from the heart of her hungry belly. Read more …