“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number-
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many – they are few.”
It’s not the first time Jeremy Corbyn has quoted verse XXXVIII of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy. He recited it on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury in 2017 in those innocent days when singing “Oh Jeremy Corbyn” to the tune of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army was popular and Boris Johnson had never presented his prime ministerial credentials to the Queen. Yesterday Corbyn posted that same verse on Twitter, using it to plug his and Len McCluskey’s looming anthology, Poetry for the Many, which can be preordered online by right-thinking lefties, though ideally, you’d think, not from Amazon.
