Percy Shelley's 'England 1819'

Percy Shelley (1792-1822) Change the date, or change country and date. Some things don’t change much. Though the hopeful ending is getting harder to believe in. It was Shelley who claimed that Poets are ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the universe’. If he really believed such mellifluous waffle he was delusional. He may have been outraged by the Peterloo Massacre, but sitting in his garden in Italy, writing this sonnet which wasn’t published til 1839 didn’t help the families of the poor or make any kind of change to Government policy.