‘The Head of the South’

 

From Jamestown till the sundering of Seventy-Six,

The head of the Southern people wore a monarch’s crown,

James the First to George the Third,

With the Puritan interregnum

An unnatural interruption

Of the patriarchal order.

In the new dispensation after independence,

Still was there a head on Dixie’s body,

An agrarian aristoi of country gentlemen,

Led by a trio of Johns –

Taylor of Caroline, Randolph of Roanoke,

And the mighty Calhoun of South Carolina –

And the finest of them all, the chivalric Lee.

Upon the death of the General

Came the times of calamity,

Without a head to lead and guide the South.

After the decay of the old planter class,

A dozen brothers led for a time.

Then Strom Thurmond tried but was denied.

Today we have only scattered voices

Raised in protest of an aberrant order,

While our old traditions are banished from the land,

Exiled further by far than Alfred the King was in Athelney.

Yet in that blessèd man is all our hope,

The first king of all the English folk,

Who saved them from an alien foe

And raised up the prostrate Church.

The headless South a head once more has found in him,

Crowned with the garland of God’s Grace,

Fairest of the line of English kings.

Beseech him, brothers and sisters,

Beseech him on bended knee

To be our father, our patriarch,

This day and all succeeding ones,

To restore wholeness and vitality

To a family shattered and weak.

The twilight of death is nigh upon us,

And soon total darkness,

If the Light of that deified head we reject.

--

Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!