The Mask of Anarchy

The Mask of Anarchy, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, was written in response to the Peterloo Massacre at St Peter's Field in Manchester, England on  August 16, 1819 in which 80 were killed and hundreds wounded when British Cavalry forces charged into a crowd of 60,000 protesting for universal male suffrage.  At the time only 11% of British males (landowners) could vote at all, but less than five thousand in a population of over two million could vote for Parliament.  

Shelley was in Italy when word of the massacre reached him.  He submitted the poem to The Examiner, the leading political and cultural weekly of the time, whose editor demurred on the presumption that his audience might not be ready for its impassioned message of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience.  Before the poem could find a publisher, Shelley died swimming in the Mediterranean in July 8, 1822.  His body washed ashore close to Viareggio in  Tuscany and was cremated in accordance with Italian law.  The Mask of Anarchy was finally published in 1832.   

The last quatrain (88 in some editions, 91 in others) especially bears memorizing:

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.

Universal male suffrage was not enacted in the UK until February 6, 1918.  Full universal suffrage for all adult men and women regardless of ownership of property came ten years later when the Equal Franchise act was passed on July 2, 1928.*

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* The next landmark in democratic representation in case Britain has lost track: universal sortition.