POETS AS PROPHETS

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 52, Issue 32308, 3 September 1943, Page 5

POETS AS PROPHETS

(To the Editor.) Sir, Your correspondent ‘‘Man’s Inhumanity To Man,” quotes' Lord Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” written in 1886 to bring to readers’ notice prophecies some of which to-day are established facts. Actually earlier poets than Tennyson prophecied the aeroplane as will be seen from the following verses published by the English poet Thomas Gray in 1837 entitled “Luna Habitalia.” Gray wrote these words: — “Time will come when thou shalt lift thine eyes To watch a long-drawn battle in the skies While aged peasants, too amazed for words Stare at the flying fleets of won‘drous birds; England so long mistress of the sea, Where winds arid waves confess her sovereignty, Her anient triumphs yet on high shall bear, And reign, the sovereign of the conquered air.”

The future has also been foretold in some unusual ways. One of the most interesting incidents of this nature dates away back to the year 1440 thereabouts. On a 500-year-old tombstone in the churchyard of Kirby, Essex, England, there is an epitaph containing these prophetic lines—- “ When pictures look alive with movements free When ships like fishes swim beneath the sea, When men outstripping birds shall scour the sky, Then half the world deep-drenched in blood shall lie.”

However, one must admit that it was one of the greatest Englishmen of all time who passed some very telling words into the mouth of one of his nest-know i characters, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. “There are more things in Heaven or Earth, Horatio, Than thou d>eamt not in your philosophy.”

Shakespeare hit the nail on the head with pretty definite regularity. He was a student of men.—l am, etc., POET. •Paeroa, 29:5:43.