With the chiminey smoke that chokes the chime
Of churchbells ringing and singing with rhyme
And outings to gather heather and thyme?
With the chiminey smoke that chokes the way
Of men to meet men and when they should pray
And how and to whom, their doom for to stay
And gladly to fast and give alms away?
With the chiminey smoke that chokes the path
From the road to the door and foreign garth
Of an host, a raft in the aftermath
Of voyages long and longing to rest
To open to heaven a heavy chest
And to meet a friend again for the best?
/Q1
Q: How does the chiminey smoke of factories choke the chime of churchbells ringing?
A: Some work nightshift and have to sleep in the morning. In Malmowe the bells of the Catholic Church (or what was perhaps once one) have been choked with leather on the claps by environment regulations of sounds to be heard in appartments. Of course the sound of cars passing by is not similarly regulated.
/Q2
Q: How does the chiminey smoke of factories choke singing with rhyme?
A: By profits paying modern intellectuals to find poetry more meaningful if it has neither rhythm nor rhyme and for that reason cannot be sung, and before that by making the first World War so awful, that many poets thought rhyme and rhythm too pretty to express what they wanted to express after being in it or after hearing about it - not thus Tolkien, who, wounded in battle and lying in a hospital listening to popular music put together the first rhymes of The Fall of Gondolin.
/Q3
Q: How does the chiminey smoke of factories choke outings to gather heather and thyme?
A: The outings to gather heather and thyme are meaningful in an agrarian society: you gather heather for your beds, thyme for spicing food or for giving your rooms a healthy smell (perhaps for other things as well, that I do not know precisely: keeping flies and germs at a distance, perhaps?) and you do it when the work on the fields or with the cattle allows it and the wheather is fine. Factory work has no such rhythm allowing for those outings, it needs many men in town, mainly as consumers and formerly as workers as well, before computers took over, and by putting small business out of work it empoverishes the countryside so as to make ”living standards” far away from nearest town lower than formerly, in times when it could flourish like the Shire (this is more patent in Kent or Oxfordshire than in Scotland and Northumberland, though) and it therefore needs the food of the countryside to be mainly transported to town, not eaten there, which is why modern agriculture with machines that save a lot of men the trouble of mowing, sowing, ploughing, harvesting and so on, thereby incidentally making sure the men who are left have much less time to go on outings or any other oldfashioned countryside fun. And it forces such new methods on the countryside, first through great landlords who have alos a vested interest in factories, then by pressure on the small farmers leading nowadays to ususry, indebted farms that are already paid for, only the interest on interest isn’t, and that will be taken away by police force if the farmers don’t pay, which they won’t, unless they play the industrial game (or that is the plan). Furthermore factory chiminey smoke has fostered a working class that will vote for governments to raise legacy duty/inheritance taxes, so once the farm (expensive through investments forced on the farmer) is nearly paid for, his sons will not afford to inherit the farm, but will have to sell it even more expensive to another that will be even more mortgaged - or the sons will be if they take a new loan to pay for the legacy duties. Also chiminey smoke is a byproduct of the process used in producing foam rubber/blown latex foam they have in beds nowadays instead of heather in many places. Which makes the outing, that was a necessity, a luxury.
/Q4
Q: How does factory chiminey smoke choke the way for men to meet men?
A: By keeping production going at a rate so figured out as to be in proportion with not any immediate (or yearly planned, ut the utmost) needs of consumption, but longterm and longdistance potentiality for selling. This needs work without rest, mainly, and sometimes shift work - not to compensate for wars or natural disasters, where such production rates were rational, but to produce economic disasters: bankruptcy by competition. But the way for men to meet men is free time. ”Six days shalt thou work, but on the seventh ye shall rest and hallow the Lord’s day.” In the desert that did n’t mean working all day, just working until the mannah for the day was collected. Only the day before a Sabbath they were allowed to collect for two days. On the Sabbath no mannah fell down from Heaven. That is miles from the Puritan work ethic!
/Q5
Q: How does factory chiminey smoke choke the way ”men should pray and how and to whom their doom for to stay”?
A: As industrialist greed can go on only with false legality and morality - basically libralism and puritanism - the factory owners have a vested interest in either blocking Catholic Monarchy and Corporativism and Catholic Holy Poverty and respect for other men’s property, including Catholic hatred of usury, out of the public domain - where in fact they belong, quite as much as in the inner domainof a man’s own conscience. This is impossible to achieve if the Catholic Mass is going on in public and all powerful and rich and their mothers, sisters, wives, daughters and younger sons have to visit it every Sunday and lots of public holidays. If in fact, as in the thirteeenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries townspeople work less days of the year than they do in modern industrial society and the days off are no vacation blocks - except Easter and Christmas - but Saints’ Days spread all over the year (many in summer and autumn) and each such day will start with attending mass, where the priest will preach about someone who took the Sermon of the Mount quite seriously - like October 4th, where the subject is St Francis of Assisi, who, like the Son of Man, abdicated the right to lay down in a bed of his own each night. But even if the public holidays are cut down as much as they were in Francisco Franco’s Spain, they make a moral climate sorely needed and wanted in the USAmerican protectorate the Philippines, stolen from Spain in the War of 1898-99 (which stopped Franco’s carreer plans to be a naval officer). Big business was mainly founded by the CHurch’s enemies - protestant lords, wealthy from the plunder and pillage of monasteries, aided by usurers belonging to that Synagogue of Satan which actually calls itself the Synagogue (there are other ones, notably masonic lodges) - and it is run in such a way as to make for either enmity or at least indifference to the Faith, Cult and Morals of the Church of God. Where did you think Tolkien got the moral qualities of the orcs from? Eyes of Huns or Mongols, skin of Zulus and hearts of ”White Anglo-Saxon Protestants” - in power. Making them responsible for industrialism, for wheels, steams and chiminey smokes, was mentioned at the first longer description of goblins in The Hobbit! And though capitalism at first gained from concern with one’s salvation - like gamblers panicking away from the taverns and throwing themselves at the feet of their patrons imploring them to give them more work to do - ultimately such concern is inimical to industrialism: patrons converting, making the work more lenient, respecting holidays and so on to honour God and save their souls - and Catholic workers refusing to work on Corpus Christi or Our Lady’s Assumption, same reason.
/Q6
Q: How does factory chiminey smoke choke the way of men gladly to fast and give alms away?
A: Fasting and almsgiving are Catholic. In so far as the implicit contradiction between industrialism (or capitalism) and Catholic CHurch becomes explicit (which has often been the case in history), Catholicism being replaced by Protestantism, which does not encourage fasting at all, nor almsgiving if the alms are given freely and directly to the beggar. Also factory workers are so overworked they are very uncomfortable fasting forty days. And they have, through low wages, lots of things to be bought and high taxes both on wages and on the goods they want to buy, less money than they should have to give in alms. THose who have the money are often people who have earned it by being greedy - and they do not give much alms - not directly to beggars, nor to people who will hand alms to beggars unconditionally, since they do not wish people to prefer begging to taking their work: that is the same in socialist countries and in liberal and mixed ones. Doctors serve them by making a hoax of claiming alcohol and public inns to be particularly nasty to the mental and physical health of poor men, so instead of giving money to beggars, they pay people to make sure the beggars do not drink wine or beer like civilised people, only water as animals, hermits and people in dire need. Often enough they make a good trade of alcoholics’ clinics and worse places where poor men are put against their will.
/Q7
Q: How does factory chiminey smoke choke the path to other men’s hospitality?
A: From the above you will have gathered that being poor is much nastier business nowadays than it used to be - even in the Sixties and Seventies a poor man had more freedom than many have now (except for a certain very vile persecution by eugenics’ in Sweden) - so some poor people take to crime, including violence. You will also have gathered that many of the rich are quite aware that such reactions are to be exspected - and that they are too closefisted themselves to exspect generosity from beggars, bums, travelling people whether Travellers (Gypsies, Tinkers) or otherwise. So they take a lot of more precautions than they really need, though it is sometimes less than they will need when it really matters. And since they do not like to be called cowards, they pretend the danger is even greater than they actually calculate - and their calculation of the danger in meeting strangers face to face is greater than the real danger already. And since they want others to feel the same anguish (so they cooperate with them rather than laugh at them), they pay the papers to publish a lot of stories of crime (pretending such stories are always more interesting than those of unexspected hospitality unexspectedly rewarded, like the hospitality of Lot who was saved from Sodom) and they pay psychiatrists to study the ”criminal” or ”pathological” minds of poorer men. Since many of the criminals are poor (the rich who do all THIS are not caught nowadays), since the differences of lifestyle are great (to cater for diversified marketing), the criminologists and psychiatrists will find many marks of poverty on criminals and on fools - or such presumed for the convenience of richer men to be such. And thus they will conclude that these marks of poverty and Christian decency be marks of crime and folly - as if they had studied the war in Afghanistan and concluded that long beards were a mark of short life exspectancy - and they will spread these stories to ladies that listen to THEM rather than to priests. And those attitudes harm hospitality.
Writer's comment:
Like Dante in Vita Nuova I both write a sonnet (he wrote several) and make intellectual comments on it.
