Complete Works of G K Chesterton, page 404
When groaned the golden and the brazen shield.
And the slaves worked the copper for their lords,
Stiff swarthy kings holding their yellow swords.
We have written the names of hucksters on the heavens
And tied our pigmy slaves to giant tools,
And chosen our nobles from the mart; and never
Stank to the sky the praise of prouder fools.
And amid the blare, the doctors and the dons,
In the Age of Brass brood on the Age of Bronze.
We clothe the dead in their theatric raiment
To hide their nakedness of normality;
Disguise by gilded mash or homed mitre
The accusing faces of such men as we:
Till the last brotherhood of men brings down
Us with the troglodites in their twilight town.
On a Prohibitionist Poem
Though Shakespeare’s Mermaid, ocean’s mightiest
daughter,
With vintage could the seas incarnadine:
And Keats’s name that was not writ in water
Was often writ in wine.
Though wine that seeks the loftiest habitation
Went to the heads of Villon and Verlaine,
Yet Hiram Hopper needs no inspiration
But water on the brain.
The Modern Magic
Prester John on his lands looked down
He bore in one mystery mitre and crown,
And the scaly webs of the strange attire
Stripped from the dragon that feeds on fire,
And high over luminous rocks and trees
And the purple fish of his secret seas
And the whole sprawled map of the magical place,
A crystal mirror before his face
For ever stood; in whose circle shone
The world and all that is done thereon.
And the Seven Kings by his throne that stand
Cried, ‘Tell us the news from the Holy Land.’
‘Richard the King, of the scarlet ships,
Sweeps over Acre, but swerves and slips
From Godfrey’s gate and from God’s own crown,
And is shot in the ditch of a small French town.
Such is the news of the world,’ he said;
‘But the signs of the world will never be read
In a glass darkly, by anyone;
We must wait for the sunrise,’ said Prester John.
Nigh on a thousand years were past
To the strange priest’s paradise pierced at last,
The men of the west, with the wondrous things
Of western wizards and western kings,
And high on their staggering engines borne
A marvel of marvels, the mighty Horn
Within whose cave, like a giant’s ear,
Might all men speak and might all men hear
The noise of a battle, the noise of a bird,
Even all the sounds of the earth were heard.
And the Seven Kings said ‘It is ended then,
The demon of distance, rending men,
Deafness of deserts and random deeds,
When everyone knows what everyone needs,
Seeing that words like winds can come,
All will be Bethlehem, all will be Rome,
And all men answer and understand,
Tell us the news from the Holy Land.
‘No battle-noise and no battle-news,
But shaking of shekels and laughter of Jews,
And a rattle of golden balls they toss
High o’er the ruin of Crescent and Cross,
And a usurer’s voice in cold command,
These are the sounds from the Holy Land.
O, horns may call us from far away,
But men hear only what men can say,
And words may go as the wide wind blows,
But what everyone wants is what nobody knows:
And the Horn will not tell it to anyone,
We must wait for the Trumpet,’ said Prester John.
Lines to an Old Pro-Boer Who Asked for
a Contribution to a Peace Periodical
You cannot think my heart so tough
To shrieks that ring or shards that rend;
You cannot think me bad enough
Nor good enough for tortures, friend.
Nor do I lightly talk of tears
Through some vague pageant of the past;
The shriek of shafts, the shock of spears,
The bursting of the arbelast.
Do you recall in that base fight,
When men were crushed with clubs of gold,
The meek and murderous flag of white
Of which our English lies were told,
Till white had washed away the red
And a calmed country found release?
Look forth today, and count the dead
Under your leprous flag of peace.
Rather than peace’s pearl to pray,
When cast before us by such swine,
I would again your friends and mine
Were riding to Pretoria.
The Apology of Bottom the Weaver
Once when an honest weaver slept,
And Puck passed by, a kindly traitor,
And on his shoulders set the head
Of a Shakespearean commentator,
The man had walked proverbial ways,
Fair Science frowned not on his birth,
Nor lost in long and tangled dreams,
The mother-wit of mother-earth.
Elaborate surgeons had not found
The cobweb made the cure too brief,
Nor vegetarians taught the rule
Of eating mustard without beef.
Only in that green night of growth
Came to him, splendid, without scorn,
The lady of the dreams of men;
The rival of all women born.
And he, for all his after weaving,
Drew up from that abysmal dream
Immortal art, that proves by seeming
All things more real than they seem.
The dancing moth was in his shuttle,
The pea’s pink blossom in his woof,
Your driving schools, your dying hamlets,
Go through them all and find the proof-
That you, where’er the old crafts linger,
Draw in their webs like nets of gold,
Hang up like banners for a pattern,
The leavings of the looms of old.
And even as this home-made rhyme
Drags but the speech of Shakespeare down,
These home-made patterns but repeat
The traceries of an ancient clown.
And while the modem fashions fade,
And while the ancient standards stream,
No psycho-analyst has knocked
The bottom out of Bottom’s dream.
The New Omar
A book of verses underneath the bough,
Provided that the verses do not scan,
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and Thou,
Short-haired, all angles, looking like a man.
But let the wine be unfermented, pale,
Of chemicals compounded, God knows how -
This were indeed the Prophets’ Paradise,
O Paradise were Wilderness enow.
Américanisation
Britannia needs no Boulevards,
No spaces wide and gay:
Her march was through the crooked streets
Along the narrow way.
Nor looks she where, New York’s seduction,
The Broadway leadeth to destruction.
Britannia needs no Cafés:
If Coffee needs must be.
Its place should be the Coffee-house
Where Johnson growled for Tea;
But who can hear that human mountain
Growl for an ice-cream soda-fountain?
She needs no Russian Theatre,
Where Father strangles Mother,
In scenes where all the characters
And colours kill each other:
Her boast is freedom had by halves,
And Britons never shall be Slavs.
But if not hers the Dance of Death,
Great Dostoievsky’s dance,
And if the things most finely French
Are better done in France -
Might not Américanisation
Be best applied to its own nation?
Ere every shop shall be a store
And every Trade a Trust. . .
Lo, many men in many lands
Know when their cause is just.
There will be quite a large attendance
When we Declare our Independence.
Alliterativism (1914)
THE LATEST SCHOOL
French airmen have been lying over Baden and
Bavaria, violating Belgian neutrality. Stated on
German authority in the “Westminster Gazette.’
See the flying French depart
Like the bees of Bonaparte,
Swarming up with a most venomous vitality.
Over Baden and Bavaria,
And Brighton and Bulgaria,
Thus violating Belgian neutrality.
And the injured Prussian may
Not unreasonably say
‘Why, it cannot be so small a nationality!’
Since Brixton and Batavia,
Bolivia and Belgravia,
Are bursting with the Belgian neutrality.
By pure Alliteration
You may trace this curious nation,
And respect this somewhat scattered principality;
When you see a B in Both
You may take your Bible oath
You are violating Belgian neutrality.
Race-Memory
By a dazed Darwinian
I remember, I remember.
Long before I was bom,
The tree-tops where my racial self
Went dancing round at mom.
Green wavering archipelagos,
Great gusty bursts of blue,
In my race-memory I recall
(Or I am told I do).
In that green-turreted Monkeyville
(So I have often heard)
It seemed as if a Blue Baboon
Might soar like a Blue Bird.
Low crawling Fundamentalists
Glared up through the green mist,
I hung upon my tail in heaven
A Firmamentalist.
*
I am too fat to climb a tree,
There are no trees to climb;
Instead, the factory chimneys rise,
Unscaleable, sublime.
The past was bestial ignorance:
But I feel a little funky,
To think I’m further off from heaven
Than when I was a monkey.
A Patriotic Song
The Golden Hind went bowling
Nor’westward of the Main,
And Drake drank deep of Spanish wine
And spat the lees at Spain.
Till northward on the colder coasts
The savages came out
To hail the ship with tossing spear
And tomahawk and shout:
For the red gods and the witch-doctors
Had cursed the golden grape
Bidding him yield up Malvoisie
And wine in every shape.
And need I say that Drake complied
And poured the wine over the side,
Invited all the Reds inside
And let them ransack far and wide
The ship that was his sinful pride
For anything his men might hide.
That so he might escape.
The top-sails of the Victory
Turned westward on a day
Great Nelson saw his sunrise land
Like a sunset fade away.
And pledged immortal beauty
And the isle beyond the foam
In the dark wine of Oporto
That his father drank at home.
His hand and glass were lifted
When they reached the rebel shore
And Hiram Hugginburg came forth
And bade him drink no more.
And naturally Nelson ran
To do his bidding and began
To empty every cup and can
And snatch the rum from every man
Who (ignorant of Hiram’s ban)
Had broken with him the battle-van
From the Nile to Elsinore.
Lo, of that leaping pennant learn,
Of those world-wandering graves,
In what more modest modem style
Britannia rules the waves.
If, loyal to some foreign cause,
We still are careful, clause by clause,
Obeying other countries’ laws.
We never shall be slaves.
Some Wishes at Xmas
Mince-pies grant Wishes: let each name his Prize,
But as for us, we wish for more Mince-Pies.
Mr Epstein
What wish has Epstein’s art portrayed?
Toward what does Rima rise?
Those little hands were never made
To tear out eagle’s eyes:
She for Green Mansions yearns; but not
So green a mansion as she got.
Dean Inge
What deep desires inspire the Gloomy Dean,
While Rima chants The Wearing of the Green?
Does he have childlike hopes at Christmas time
And sing a carol or a nursery rhyme?
Does he hang up a stocking - or a gaiter -
Or ask for gifts from any Alma Mater?
(Tell me, do Matthew, Mark, and Luke and John
Bless beds the Higher Critics lie upon?
Or if, while the Fourth Gospel is re-read,
‘Synoptists’ sleep on a three-cornered bed).
Or, like the Deutero-Job, who far away
On his interpolated ash-heap lay,
Damns he the day whereon his body and soul
Escaped the vigilance of Birth-Control?
Or, softened while the herald angel sings,
Does he more mildly wish for lesser things
That warning cracks, marking the house that falls,
Should decorate St Peter’s, not St Paul’s;
Or wish in all good faith to friends held dear
A Gloomy Christmas and a Glum New Year?
A Merry Christmas to a Merrier Dean!
Whatever he may want, whatever mean,
He won’t be happy till he gets it; when
He does, perhaps he won’t be happy then.
A Lady M. P.
She wants a new England, more bright and more clean.
Where foul tap-room revelries never are seen.
And after the quarter-staff flies the quart-pot,
For she wants a new England where these things are not,
And our love of old England is vain in her sight,
As the noise of blind drunkards that strive in the night,
As if our old England like fable could fade,
And a Puritan purge through the ages had made
A Shaker of Shakespeare, a grave man of Gay,
And a Pussyfoot Johnson with Boswell to play.
For she wants a new England, where censors and prigs
Can browbeat our jokes and can bridle our jigs.
The title is apt, and the tale is soon told,
She wants a New England, three hundred years old.
The Communists
There are two normal nuisances
That stir us late or soon:
One is the man who wants the earth,
The other wants the moon.
Choosing between these last and Jix,
We much prefer the lunatics.
*
Jix
Since Christmas time brings charity
For Jix and for the Kaiser,
We wish that they were wise enough
To wish that they were wiser.
Commercial Candour
On the outside of a sensational novel is printed the statement: ‘The back of the cover will tell you the plot.’
Our fathers to creed and tradition were tied,
They opened a book to see what was inside,
And of various methods they deemed not the worst
Was to find the first chapter and look at it first.
And so from the first to the second they passed,
Till in servile routine they arrived at the last.
But a literate age, unbenighted by creed,
Can find on two boards all it wishes to read;
For the front of the cover shows somebody shot
And the back of the cover will tell you the plot.
Between, that the book may be handily padded,
Some pages of mere printed matter are added.
Expanding the theme, which in case of great need
The curious reader might very well read
With the zest that is lent to a game worth the winning,
By knowing the end when you start the beginning;
While our barbarous sires, who would read every word
With a morbid desire to find out what occurred
Went drearily drudging through Dickens and Scott.
But the back of the cover will tell you the plot.
The wild village folk in earth’s earliest prime
Could often sit still for an hour at a time
And hear a blind beggar, nor did the tale pall
Because Hector must fight before Hector could fall:
Nor was Scheherazade required, at the worst,
To tell her tales backwards and finish them first;
And the minstrels who sang about battle and banners
Found the rude camp-fire crowd had some notion of manners.
