Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 403
Behind us on the road; and all strange things
Looked back to something stranger than themselves.
And, towering still and trampling, the Last Centaur
Cried in a roar that shook the shuddering trees,
‘We rode our bodies without bridle at will,
We hurled our high breasts forward on flying hooves:
But these two bodies are a simple thing
Beside that Fear that comes upon the world.
A Monster walks behind.’ I dared not turn;
A shape lay like a shadow on the road.
I saw not but I heard; a sound more awful,
Then from the blackest cypress-close the call
Of some dark Janus shouting with two mouths:
‘I am Prometheus. I am Jupiter.
In ravening obedience down from heaven,
Hailed of my hand and by this sign alone,
My eagle comes to tear me. Touch me not.’
I lay there as one dead. But since I woke
This single world is double till I die.
The Modern Manichee
He sayeth there is no sin, and all his sin
Swells round him into a world made merciless;
The midnight of his universe of shame
Is the vast shadow of his shamelessness.
He blames all that begat him, gods or brutes.
And sires not sons he chides as with a rod.
The sins of the children visited on the fathers
Through all generations, back to a jealous God.
The fields that heal the humble, the happy forests
That sing to men confessed and men consoled,
To him are jungles only, greedy and groping,
Heartlessly new, unvenerably old.
Beyond the pride of his own cold compassion
Is only cruelty and imputed pain:
Matched with that mood, a boy’s sport in the forest
Makes comrades of the slayer and the slain.
The innocent lust of the unfallen creatures
Moves him to hidden horror but no mirth;
Misplaced morality rots in the roots unconscious,
His stifled conscience stinks through the green earth.
The green things thrust like horrible huge snails,
Horns green and gross, each lifting a leering eye
He scarce can call a flower; it lolls obscene,
Its organs gaping to the sneering sky.
Dark with that dusk the old red god of gardens,
Still pagan but not merry any more,
Stirs up the dull adulteries of the dust.
Blind, frustrate, hopeless, hollow at the core;
The plants are brutes tied with green rope and roaring
Their terrible dark loves from tree to tree:
He shrinks as from a shaft, if by him singing,
A gilded pimp and pandar, goes the bee.’
He sayeth, ‘I have no sin; I cast the stone,’
And throws his little pebble at the shrine,
Casts sin and stone away against the house
Whose health has turned earth’s waters into wine.
The venom of that repudiated guilt
Poisons the sea and every natural flood
As once a wavering tyrant washed his hands,
And touching, turned the water black with blood.
The Port of London Authority
Mr Ben TiUett is reported to have once prayed
in public Jor the death of Lord Devonport.
DAILY PAPER
We whom great mercy holds in fear,
Boast not the claim to cry,
Stricken of any mortal wrong,
‘Lord, let this live man die!’
But not incuriously we ask,
Pondering on life and death,
What name befits that round of years,
What name that span of breath.
That perfect dullness counting hands
That have no man or woman.
That fullness of the commonplace
That can despise the common.
That startling smallness that can stop
The breath like an abyss,
As, staring at rows of nought, we cry,
‘And men grow old for this!’
The thing that sniggers when it sneers,
That never can forget,
The billycock outshines the cap,
And then - the coronet!
O mighty to arise and smite,
O mightier to forgive,
Sunburst that blasted Lazarus,
Lord, let this dead man live!
By a Reactionary
Smoke rolls in stinking, suffocating wrack
On Shakespeare’s land, turning the green one black;
The crowds that once to harvest home would come
Hope for no harvest and possess no home,
While poor old tramps that liked a little ale,
In natural procession passed to gaol;
Because the world must, like the tramp, move on,
There does not seem much else that can be done.
As Lord Vangelt said in the House of Peers:
‘None of us want Reaction.’ (Tory cheers).
So doubtful doctors punch and prod and prick
A man thought dead; and when there’s not a kick
Left in the corpse, no twitch or faint contraction,
The doctors say: ‘See . . . there is no Reaction.’
A Broad Minded Bishop Rebukes
The Verminous St Francis
If Brother Francis pardoned Brother Flea,
There still seems need of such strange charity,
Seeing he is, for all his gay goodwill,
Bitten by funny little creatures still.
The Battle of the Stories (1915)
In the Caucasus.
They came uncounted like the stars that circle or are set,
They circled and they caught us as in a sparkling casting-net
We burst it in the mountain gate where all the guns began,
When the snow stood up at Christmas on the hills of Ardahan.
The guns - and not a bell to tell that God was made a man -
But we did all remember, though all the world forget.
Before Paris.
The kings came over the olden Rhine to break an ancient debt,
We took their rush at the river of death in the fields where first we met,
But we marked their millions swaying; then we marked a
standard fell;
And far beyond them, like a bird, Maunoury’s bugle call:
And there were not kings or debts or doubts or anything at all
But the People that remembers and the peoples that forget.
In Flanders.
Empty above your bleating hordes his throne abides the threat,
Who drew the sword of his despair to front your butcher’s bet:
You shall scan the empty scabbard; you shall search the empty
seat.
While he along the ruined skies rides royal with retreat,
In the judgment and the silence and the grass upon the street.
And the oath the heavens remember and you would fein forget.
In Poland.
A cloud was on the face of God when three kings met,
What hour the worst of men were made the sun hath suffered yet.
We knew them in their nibbling peace or ever they went to war.
In petty school and pilfered field we know them what they are.
And we drank the cup of anguish to the pardon of the Czar,
To the nations that remember and the empires that forget.
In the Dardanelles.
To the home mount of the high Mahound of moon and of minaret
Labouring go the sieging trains whose tracks are blood and sweat.
The ships break in a sanguine sea; and far to the front a boy
Fallen, and his face flung back to shout with the Son of God for joy.
And the long land under the lifted smoke; and a great light on Troy,
And all that men remember and madmen can forget.
In the Balkans.
They thrice on crags of death were dry and thrice in Danube wet
To prove an old man’s empty heart was empty of regret,
For the Turks have taken his city’s soul: his spurs of gold are dross,
And the Crescent hangs upon him while we hang upon the Cross.
But we heave our tower of pride upon Kossovo of the loss,
For a proof that we remember and the infidels forget.
In the Alps.
Master of Arts and mastery of arms, master of all things yet,
For the musket as for the mandolin the master fingers fret;
The news to the noise of the mandolin that all the world comes home,
And the young are young and the years return and the days of the
kingdom come.
When the wars wearied, and the tribes turned; and the sun rose on
Rome,
And all that Rome remembers when all her realms forget.
In the North Sea.
Though the seas were sown with the news dragons that knew not
what they ate,
We broke St George’s banner out to the black wind and the wet,
He hath broken all the bridges we could fling, the world and we,
But the bridge of death in heaven that His people might be free,
That we straddled for the saddle of the riders of the sea.
For St George that shall remember if the Dragon shall forget.
All the Voices.
Behold, we are men of many lands, in motley seasons set,
From Riga to the rock of Spain, from Orkney to Olivet,
Who stand up in the council in the turning of the year,
And, standing, give the judgment on the evil house of fear;
Knowing the End shall write again what we have written here,
On the day when God remembers and no man can forget.
To the Unknown Warrior
You whom the king saluted; who refused not
The one great gesture of ignoble days,
Fame without name and glory without gossip,
Whom no biographer befouls with praise.
Who said of you ‘Defeated? In the darkness
The dug-out where the limelight never comes,
Nor the big drum of Bamum’s Show can shatter
That vibrant stillness after all the drums.
Though the time come when every Yankee circus
Can use our soldiers for its sandwich-men,
When those that pay the piper call the tune,
You will not dance. You will not move again.
You will not march for Fatty Arbuckle,
Though he have yet a favourable press,
Tender a San Francisco to St Francis,
Or all the Angels of Los Angeles.
They shall not storm the last unfallen fortress,
The lonely castle where uncowed and free
Dwells the unknown and undefeated warrior
That did alone defeat Publicity.
To a Lady
Light of the young, before you have grown old
The world will have grown weary of its youth,
All its cheap charity and loose-lipped truth,
And passion that goes naked - and grows cold.
Tire of a pity so akin to hate,
Turn on a truth that is so near to treason,
When Time, the god of traitors, in their season
Marks down for dated all the up-to-date.
Then shall men know by the great grace you are,
How something better than blind fear or blunder
Bade us stand back, where we could watch with wonder,
Ladies like landscapes, very fair and far.
A crowd shall call your high estrangéd face,
A mask of blind reaction and resistance,
Because you have made large the world with distance,
As God made large the universe with space.
Yet beautiful your feet upon the mountains,
Moving in soundless music shall return,
And they that look into your eyes shall learn -
Having forced up the secret sea in fountains.
And having vulgarised infinity,
And splashed their brains against the starry steeps,
In what unfathomable inward deeps
Dwells the last mystery men call Liberty.
When they shall say we scorned and held in thrall
Spirits like yours; the mother of the tribe
Slandered, a slave, a butt for slur and gibe,
You shall confound the one great slur of all.
The one great slander answered long ago
By Her that hid all things within her heart,
One speaking when the veil was rent apart,
‘Women alone can keep a secret so.’
The World State
Oh, how I love Humanity,
With love so pure and pringlish,
And how I hate the horrid French,
Who never will be English!
The International Idea,
The largest and the clearest,
Is welding all the nations now,
Except the one that’s nearest.
This compromise has long been known,
This scheme of partial pardons,
In ethical societies
And small suburban gardens —
The villas and the chapels where
I learned with little labour
The way to love my fellow-man
And hate my next-door neighbour.
The Old Gentleman in the Park
Beyond the trees like iron trees,
The painted lamp-posts stand.
The old red road runs like the rust
Upon this iron land.
Cars flat as fish and fleet as birds,
Low-bodied and high speeded,
Go on their belly like the Snake,
And eat the dust as he did.
But down the red dust never more
Her happy horse-hoofs go.
O, what a road of rust indeed!
O, what a Rotten Row!
The Buried City
You that go forth upon the buried cities,
Whose witchcraft holds the withered kings together,
Seals up the very air of ancient seasons,
Like secret skies walled up from the world’s weather.
You that dig up dead towns - arise and strive:
Strike through the slums and save the towns alive!
Dig London out of London; pierce the cavern
Where Manchester lies lost in Manchester.
You that re-chart the choked-up squares and markets,
Retrace the plan our blindness made a blur:
Until a name no more, but wide and tall,
Arise and shine the shield of London Wall.
Strike you the stones of these most desert places,
Huge warehouses the lonely watchmen tread,
Where ringed in noise the hollow heart of London
Lies all night long a city of the dead.
Or does One watch high o’er this maze that sprawls,
High on the vanished spire of Old St Paul’s?
Life up your heads, ye gates of our remembrance,
Be lifted up, ye everlasting walls,
The gates revolve upon their giant hinges,
The guilds return unto their ancient halls.
Tell Bishopsgate a Bishop rides to town,
Not only come to pull the churches down.
You that let light into the sunken cities,
Let life into the void where light is vain
Ere vandals wreck the temples, porch and pillar,
Bring back fhe people to the porch again
Who find in tombs strange flowers, flattened and dried,
Quicken the incredible seed of London Pride.
If our vain haste has smothered home in houses
As our vain creeds have smothered man in men.
Though in that rock tomb sleeps the King less deeply
Than in this brick tomb sleeps the Citizen,
What will not God achieve if Man awake,
Since a rock-tomb was rended for our sake?
Namesake
Maty of Holyrood may smile indeed,
Knowing what grim historic shade it shocks
To see wit, laughter and the Popish creed,
Cluster and sparkle in the name of Knox.
Outline of History
A fishbone pattern of flint arrows battened
A fossil vision of the Age of Stone -
And sages in war-weary empires quarrel
With those quaint quarrels and forget their own.
What riddle is of the elf-darts or the elves
But the strange stony riddle of ourselves?
As by long worms the hills are pierced with holes,
Where long day’s joumeyings without light of day
Lead to a painted cave, a buried sky,
Whose clouds are creatures sprawling in coloured clay;
And men ask how and why such things were done
Darkly, with dyes that never saw the sun.
I have seen a statue in a London square.
One whose long-winded lies are long forgot,
Gleams with the rain above the twinkling bushes,
And birds perch on him in that unroofed plot.
Unriddle that dark image; and I will show
The secret of your pictured rocks below.
As green volcanic skies bury dark sunsets,
Green rust like snakes crawled, and their work concealed
The men who were red shadows in copper mirrors,
