ROUGH MUSICK
Ye Prologue:
There’s an old radical tradition
Of beating pots and pans in the street,
Making a public din
(Rather than a private dinner),
Ringing bells, banging pans, blowing horns,
With domestic utensils used in public,
And beating drums,
Expressing disapprobation
Through community pandemonium,
And a cacophony of disharmony.
It’s ROUGH MUSICK,
A symbolic and cacophonous
Criticism of the ruling class.
A symbolic representation of disapproval,
Marking a transgression of agreed social norms
By the great and good;
A community PANDAEMONIUM
To indicate disapproval of rulers,
With a pantomimic declamation of their crimes,
The wrong-doer often shown in effigy,
Sometimes riding the SKIMMINGTON,
As in The Mayor of Casterbridge,
Or the 1825 Stroud weavers’ riots,
As the world is turned upside down.
But today,
We show our disapproval in a different way,
But in a continuity with the past,
For
Hate Speech is not Humour or Wit,
It is a Tumour on the Body Politic.