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    Poems
    Poems
    Poems
    Ebook125 pages1 hour

    Poems

    By G K Chesterton

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    Contents Include: Three Dedications To Edmund Clerihew Bentley To Hilaire Belloc To M.E.W War Poems Lepanto The March of the Black Mountain 1913 Blessed are the Peacemakers The Wife of Flanders The Crusader Returns from Captivity LOVE POEMS: Glencoe Love's Trappist Confessional Music The Deluge The Strange Music The Great Minimum The Mortal Answers The Marriage Song Bay Combe RELIGIOUS POEMS: The Wise Men The House of Christmas A Song of gifts to God The Kingdom of Heaven A Hymn for the Church Militant The Beatific Vision The Truce of Christmas A Hymn A Christmas Song for Three Guilds The Nativity A Child of the Snows A Word RHYMES FOR THE TIMES: Antichrist, or the Reunion of Christendom An Ode The Revolutionist, or Lines to a Statesman The Shakespeare Memorial The Horrible History of Jones The New Freethinker In Memoriam P.D Sonnet with the Compliments of the Season A Song of Swords A Song of Defeat Sonnet Africa The Dead Hero An Election Echo The Song of the Wheels The Secret People MISCELLANEOUS POEMS: Lost Ballad of the Sun Translation from Du Bellay The Higher Unity The Earth's Vigil On Righteous Indignation When I Came Back to Fleet Street A Cider Song The Last Hero BALLADES: Ballade D'Une Grande Dame A Ballade of an Anti-Puritan A Ballade of a Book Reviewer A Ballade of Suicide A Ballade of the First Rain
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStart Classics
    Release dateFeb 18, 2014
    ISBN9781609773588
    Author

    G K Chesterton

    G. K. Chesterton was one of the most beloved and prolific authors of the twentieth century. He wrote dozens of popular books on a variety of topics and thousands of essays. His works include Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man, The Man Who Was Thursday, and the Father Brown mystery stories.

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      Book preview

      Poems - G K Chesterton

      I.

      THREE DEDICATIONS

      TO EDMUND CLERIHEW BENTLEY

      THE DEDICATION OF THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

      A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather, Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together. Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;

      The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay.

      Round us in antic order their crippled vices came--

      Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame. Like the white lock of Whistler, that lit our aimless gloom, Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume. Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung; The world was very old indeed when you and I were young. They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named: Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.

      Weak if we were and foolish, not thus we failed, not thus; When that black Baal blocked the heavens he had no hymns from us. Children we were--our forts of sand were even as weak as we, High as they went we piled them up to break that bitter sea. Fools as we were in motley, all jangling and absurd,

      When all church bells were silent our cap and bells were heard.

      Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled; Some giants laboured in that cloud to lift it from the world. I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things; And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass, Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass; Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain Truth out of Tusitala spoke and pleasure out of pain.

      Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey, Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day,

      But we were young; we lived to see God break their bitter charms, God and the good Republic come riding back in arms:

      We have seen the city of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved--Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.

      This is a tale of those old fears, even of those emptied hells, And none but you shall understand the true thing that it tells-- Of what colossal gods of shame could cow men and yet crash, Of what huge devils hid the stars, yet fell at a pistol flash. The doubts that were so plain to chase, so dreadful to withstand-- Oh, who shall understand but you; yea, who shall understand? The doubts that drove us through the night as we two talked amain, And day had broken on the streets e'er it broke upon the brain. Between us, by the peace of God, such truth can now be told; Yea, there is strength in striking root, and good in growing old. We have found common things at last, and marriage and a creed. And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read.

      TO HILAIRE BELLOC

      THE DEDICATION OF THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL

      For every tiny town or place

          God made the stars especially;

      Babies look up with owlish face

          And see them tangled in a tree:

      You saw a moon from Sussex Downs,

          A Sussex moon, untravelled still,

      I saw a moon that was the town's,

          The largest lamp on Campden Hill.

      Yea, Heaven is everywhere at home.

          The big blue cap that always fits,

      And so it is (be calm; they come

          To goal at last, my wandering wits),

      So it is with the heroic thing;

          This shall not end for the world's end,

      And though the sullen engines swing,

          Be you not much afraid, my friend.

      This did not end by Nelson's urn

          Where an immortal England sits--

      Nor where your tall young men in turn

          Drank death like wine at Austerlitz.

      And when the pedants bade us mark

          What cold mechanic happenings

      Must come; our souls said in the dark,

          Belike; but there are likelier things.

      Likelier across these flats afar,

          These sulky levels smooth and free,

      The drums shall crash a waltz of war

          And Death shall dance with Liberty;

      Likelier the barricades shall blare

          Slaughter below and smoke above,

      And death and hate and hell declare

          That men have found a thing to love.

      Far from your sunny uplands set

          I saw the dream; the streets I trod,

      The lit straight streets shot out and met

          The starry streets that point to God;

      The legend of an epic hour

          A child I dreamed, and dream it still,

      Under the great grey water-tower

          That strikes the stars on Campden Hill

      TO M. E. W.

      Words, for alas my trade is words, a barren burst of rhyme,

          Rubbed by a hundred rhymesters, battered a thousand times,

      Take them, you, that smile on strings, those nobler sounds than mine,

          The words that never lie, or brag, or flatter, or malign.

      I give a hand to my lady, another to my friend,

          To whom you too have given a hand; and so before the end

      We four

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