Annus Mirabilis
by John Dryden

Night came, but without darkness or repose,
A dismal picture of the gen’ral doom:
Where souls distracted when the trumpet blows,
And half unready with their bodies come.

Those who have homes, when home they do repair,
To a last lodging call their wand’ring friends.
Their short uneasie sleeps are broke with care,
To look how near their own destruction tends.

Those who have none sit round where once it was,
And with full eyes each wonted room require:
Haunting the yet warm ashes of the place,
As murder’d men walk where they did expire.

Some stir up coals and watch the Vestal fire,
Others in vain from sight of ruin run:
And, while through burning lab’rinths they retire,
With loathing eyes repeat what they would shun.

The most in fields, like herded beasts lie down;
To dews obnoxious on the grassie floor
And while their Babes in sleep their sorrows drown,
Sad parents watch the remnants of their store.

While by the motion of the flames they ghess
What streets are burning now, and what are near;
An Infant waking, to the paps would press,
And meets, instead of milk, a falling tear.

Comment by Ira Maine, Poetry Editor

Constantly on TV we are shown horrifying  images of people driven from their homes either by war or natural disasters.  John Dryden, Poet Laureate, was born in about 1630, moved to London, where he survived the English Civil War, The Restoration, the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London of 1666.

What this poem brilliantly evokes for me is the mind’s absolute incomprehension in the aftermath of a disaster which has not only destroyed the individual’s own home, but the entire neighbourhood. Everything that was familiar has gone, and people who lived next door, or down the road, simply have ceased to exist.

Those who remain are left stunned, consumed by disbelief, sitting or poking aimlessly in the ash, purposeless, traumatised, shell-shocked.

The Fire was 450 years ago.  The reaction to the fire, as recorded in the poem, is precisely the reaction we see regularly on our television screens.

Everything changes, but every thing remains the same…