William Carlos Williams
AN EXULTATION
England, confess your sins! toward the poor,
upon the body of my grandmother. Let the agents
of destruction purify you with bombs, cleanse
you of the profits of your iniquities to the last
agony of relinquishment.
She didn't die! Neither shall you, if
day by day you learn through abnegation
as she did, to send up thanks to those who
rain fire upon you.
Thanks! thanks to a just and kind
h~aven
for this light that comes as a blasting fire
destroying the rottenness of your slums as well
as your most noble and historic edifices, never
to be replaced!
If! You will survive if-you accept it with
thanks when, like her, excoriated by devils
you will have preserved in the end, as she did,
a purity-to be that never as yet known
leader and regenerator of nations, even of those
rotten to the core, who by a sovereignty
they cannot comprehend
have worked this cleansing mystery upon you.
fOOTNOTE TO
"AN
EXULTATION"
My English grandmother of whom I know very little, as I know very
little of any of my forebears, herself told me at least this much: That she
had been an orphan who was adopted by a "rich" family of Godwins living
in London. They brought her up. Something then happened, she always
kept it a mystery, which caused her to leave them. Perhaps they threw her
out. In any case she came to America with my father a five-year-old child,
intending to go "on the stage" but married instead, etc., etc. The point is
lhe always carried a deep seated resentment against those who had treated
laer so badly in the country of her birth saying, that
if
she had had her
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