Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, TWO HISTORIES, by CHARLES WILLIAM BRODRIBB


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

TWO HISTORIES, by                    
First Line: Two histories there are in england's isle
Last Line: Forbidding civil war to imp its wings.
Subject(s): Butterfield, Herbert (1900-1979); Great Britain - Civil War; History; English Civil War; Historians


(On reading Professor H. Butterfield's "The Englishman and his History")

Two Histories there are in England's isle:
One is of hard sought scientific fact
God by research laborious and exact
And needing patient teamwork to compile—
A monument that none may dare hold vile,
For thus, it teaches, Truth herself must act,
Whose is the deft and salutary tact
To explode the false, lay bare the forger's guile.

The other pores not over books and deeds,
But lives enshrined in hearts of transient men,
Continuously as age to age succeeds,
And little recks it the revising pen:
It is that Whiggery the nation reads
In its own eyes and every citizen.

And seasons have been when
It has supremely grasped the helm of state,
Making tumultuous passions moderate
And yield to cool debate;
Disarming mobs, gently unthroning Kings,
Forbidding civil war to imp its wings.





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