by Zoë Pollock
“The Masque of Anarchy,” by Percy Shelley:
Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free. …Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war…
The full poem is here. Austin Allen connects the dots between this poem and the Arab Spring by pointing out that "it's a description of a nonviolent protest, written before the term had ever been used or the tactic ever attempted":
One of [the poem's] American readers was Henry David Thoreau, who had it in mind when, in the late 1840s, he wrote “Civil Disobedience”—the first great prose formulation of the concept of nonviolent resistance. Thoreau’s essay, in turn, was taken up by Tolstoy, whose book The Kingdom of God Is Within You spread a Christianized version of the concept to millions of fervent readers. Then in the twentieth century came Gandhi, a leader openly influenced by Tolstoy, Thoreau, and Shelley’s poem, which he often recited to his own “vast assemblies.”
The rest is history—and the present.
(Photo: An Israeli left-wing activist flashes the victory sign from a police van after he was arrested July 8, 2011 at the Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv, Israel. A group of Israeli protesters gathered to welcome 'Pro-Palestinian Fly-In' activists who traveled in a mass protest to visit to the West Bank. By Uriel Sinai/Getty Images.)
The Dish 