In a Copy of More's (or Shaw's or Wells's
or Plato's or Anybody's) Utopia
So this is Utopia, is it? Well
I beg your pardon, I thought it was Hell.
And still some of those among us persist. But truisms are, well, true. For instance: The more things change, the more things stay the same. Thomas Hardy knew this: "Only thin smoke without flame/From the heaps of couch-grass;/Yet this will go onward the same/Though Dynasties pass." ("In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'," Stanza II.) Utopians (our modern-day scolds, nannies, and self-styled "progressives") are always ignorant (blissfully or not) of this: "Gods make their own importance."
Epic
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided: who owned
That half a rood of rock, a no-man's land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting 'Damn your soul'
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step the plot defying blue cast-steel --
'Here is the march along these iron stones.'
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was most important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind
He said: I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance.
Patrick Kavanagh, Come Dance With Kitty Strobling and Other Poems (1960). According to the OED, a "rood" is "a unit of land area equal to 40 square rods (a quarter of an acre), but varying locally." A "march" is a boundary.
