I feel as free as they are—
Compared with miserable slaves and serfs,
In the pasture, in the alley, in the street.
Although your dungeon is bigger than mine,
You're wearing the same shackles as me,
Britain is a new prison cell modeled after hell.
The jailer is weak and evil.
In the cell! But I don't complain,
Even if I lie in the arms of "loneliness";
Long before time attacked and leveled the prison walls,
These walls will collapse.
They block the light and cover the blue sky.
Build high barriers and walls,
But the light of knowledge will penetrate everything,
Bring the sun that shines on the world.
They can silence the sound with silent bans,
Destroy us with ropes and instruments of torture;
But coercion and violence are just fools' stupidity,
Will crash into pieces on hard rocks.
They will hear our cry again on the plain,
In the streets, in the valleys, in the mountains,
They can beat us again, but we are still.
Hit them! Hit them! Hit them!
(translated by Bai Fei)
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19 from the late 1930s to the 1950s, a massive charter movement took place in Britain. Charter activists often give speeches at mass gatherings, start newspapers, and write poems, novels, essays and literary criticism articles to encourage publicity. These constitute a wealth of charter documents. Although there are various forms of charter literature, poetry is its main component.
Prisoner to Slave is a battle poem written by Jones in prison. This poem embodies the characteristics of chartist poetry in both content and form. First of all, poetry shows a distinct political tendency. The first sentence of the poem, "I look back at the world from a single cell,/I feel that my freedom is not less than theirs-",directly points out the author's political position: although I am a prisoner, slaves and serfs outside the prison are not more free than me, because "Britain is a new cell built in the style of hell", so breaking the prison wall and bringing the dawn of freedom to the people is our goal. Secondly, poetry embodies a strong militancy. At that time, Jones was treated inhumanely in prison, but he still insisted on writing poetry with blood and memory, using poetry as a weapon of struggle, exposing the evil of capitalist oppression and encouraging the masses to rise up and resist. He thinks that Britain is a big prison, and the working people are all slaves in chains. "The jailer is weak and evil." The implication is that in this evil country, weakness, like the evil of capitalism, is the direct source of people's oppression and exploitation. If you want to be free, you must have the courage to tear down the prison wall that blocks the light and covers the blue sky. Even if we fail again and again, we still have to "impact endlessly". Third, poetry has a broad mass. In content, it exposed the evils of capitalist society and called on workers to resist oppression through mass movements and strive for their own freedom and rights, which met the needs of mass movements at that time. Formally, this poem adopts a ballad style that the masses love to see and hear. Its lyrics are popular, lively, easy to read and remember, which is very suitable for collective singing. Repeated rhetorical devices have been used many times, forming a high style and showing a vigorous revolutionary optimism. At the end of the sentence, "hit them, hit them, hit them!" Just like the horn that inspires the battle, it sings the belief in the revolution and the hope for the future.
In addition to the distinctive features of chartist poetry, the poem Prisoner to Slave has reached a quite high level in artistic achievement. It has strong lyricism, rich and appropriate choice of words, flexible and vivid rhetoric, concise poetic rhythm and strong sense of rhythm. In style, Jones's poetry still inherits the tradition of British poetry handed down from generation to generation, such as Burns, Byron and Shelley, but he also has his own unique style and novel artistic conception. Because of the revolutionary content and profound ideological content of his works, he is regarded as the founder of British proletarian revolutionary literature.
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