Chesterton’s Poetry

Posted on by Edrith by

Chesterton is one of my favourite authors; an author of which I’ll read almost anything he wrote, regardless of what it is. His writing catches you up with his wonderfully lyrical style, filled with memorable quotes, and even when you’re disagreeing with him, you can’t help but admire the majesty of his argument.

He was tremendously prolific, writing “80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, 4000 essays, and several plays.” Some of the best known of his works are the Father Brown stories, detective short stories which rank alongside the very best in the genre, featuring a Catholic priest, the eponymous Father Brown, as the detective. His novels are also good, though frequently surreal; both The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill require one to voluntarily suspend disbelief at times – in the former, as the subtitle says, nightmarishly, in the latter more innocently.

Outside of Father Brown, however, his non-fiction is perhaps even better than his fiction. His classic works, “Orthodoxy” and “Heresies”, remain superb apologetics surprisingly relevant today, even in the case of heresies. “What’s Wrong With the World” is a brilliant polemic, in which he inveighs, in turn, against eugenics (surprisingly far-sighted), women’s suffrage (rather less far-sighted) and central heating (simply odd) amongst other things. Chesterton’s gift is that his writing is so lucid and eloquent that even when you disagree, he forces you to confront your assumptions, as well as his genius for expressing difficult concepts in pithy conciseness.

His poetry, however, is something that I’ve only more recently realised he’d written. I’m neither a big nor a sophisticated lover of poetry, preferring poems that are simple, straight forward and somewhat traditional, with resonating language and clear stories as anyone who looks at the ‘Poems’ rounds in my Christmas Quizzes will know. And I won’t pretend to be an expert on Chesterton’s, but at a simple level, his gift for writing shines through here, also.

The Donkey is one of his best known and is both short and tightly written. Though I’m not religious, in this and some of his other Christian poems he manages to send chills down my spine – a clear success, in religious poetry. The whole poem bristles with fierce defiance, from the first line to the last, and is just filled with imagery and emotion.

The Donkey (G. K. Chesterton)

When fishes flew and forests walked
   And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
   Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry
   And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
   On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth,
   Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
   I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour;
   One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
   And palms before my feet

 

The other poem I’d single out is of quite a different nature, that represents his ballads – longer, story poems, more in the tradition of Macaulay or Browning. It celebrates the Battle of Lepanto which, as any player of Diplomacy will know, has something to do with Italy and Austria defeating Turkey(1). Much longer, much denser, but still absolutely packed with imagery and with a narrative that draws you on. Chesterton is doing a lot more here, with interesting rhythms and rhyme schemes, as well as far more complex metaphors and references, but he still manages to keep the emotion at the surface.

Some of my favourite parts are the minor lines with manage to say everything. “The cold queen of England is looking in the glass” sets the stage perfectly for the brutal section further down that begins, “The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes” (bear in mind here that Chesterton is Catholic); or “And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun” which gives a human side to all the pomp and majesty described. But what sings through most is the sense of joyous battle-readiness that shines through from Don John, alone of all the characters mentioned:

Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain—hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

It’s the sort of poem that people don’t often write any more, at least not with such skill, and it’s a triumph of its type.

Lepanto (G. K. Chesterton)

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young,
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain—hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.
Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.
They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,—
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, “Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate ;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.”
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still—hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.
St. Michael’s on his mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
      Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.
King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial, and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John’s hunting, and his hounds have bayed—
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.
The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man’s house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings’ horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign—
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!
Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade….
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

 

 

(1) It was the first major naval defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the forces of Christian Europe; along with the Siege of Vienna, it was one of the key turning points that marked the end of Ottoman expansion.

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