The Ballad of the White Horse. Gilbert Keith Chesterton

free to roam,

                Your face, that is a wandering home,

                A flying home for me.

                Ride through the silent earthquake lands,

                Wide as a waste is wide,

                Across these days like deserts, when

                Pride and a little scratching pen

                Have dried and split the hearts of men,

                Heart of the heroes, ride.

                Up through an empty house of stars,

                Being what heart you are,

                Up the inhuman steeps of space

                As on a staircase go in grace,

                Carrying the firelight on your face

                Beyond the loneliest star.

                Take these; in memory of the hour

                We strayed a space from home

                And saw the smoke-hued hamlets, quaint

                With Westland king and Westland saint,

                And watched the western glory faint

                Along the road to Frome.

      BOOK I. THE VISION OF THE KING

                Before the gods that made the gods

                Had seen their sunrise pass,

                The White Horse of the White Horse Vale

                Was cut out of the grass.

                Before the gods that made the gods

                Had drunk at dawn their fill,

                The White Horse of the White Horse Vale

                Was hoary on the hill.

                Age beyond age on British land,

                Aeons on aeons gone,

                Was peace and war in western hills,

                And the White Horse looked on.

                For the White Horse knew England

                When there was none to know;

                He saw the first oar break or bend,

                He saw heaven fall and the world end,

                O God, how long ago.

        For the end of the world was long ago,

                And all we dwell to-day

                As children of some second birth,

                Like a strange people left on earth

                After a judgment day.

                For the end of the world was long ago,

                When the ends of the world waxed free,

                When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves,

                And the sun drowned in the sea.

                When Caesar's sun fell out of the sky

                And whoso hearkened right

                Could only hear the plunging

                Of the nations in the night.

                When the ends of the earth came marching in

                To torch and cresset gleam.

                And the roads of the world that lead to Rome

                Were filled with faces that moved like foam,

                Like faces in a dream.

                And men rode out of the eastern lands,

                Broad river and burning plain;

                Trees that are Titan flowers to see,

                And tiger skies, striped horribly,

                With tints of tropic rain.

                Where Ind's enamelled peaks arise

                Around that inmost one,

                Where ancient eagles on its brink,

                Vast as archangels, gather and drink

                The sacrament of the sun.

                And men brake out of the northern lands,

                Enormous lands alone,

                Where a spell is laid upon life and lust

                And the rain is changed to a silver dust

                And the sea to a great green stone.

                And a Shape that moveth murkily

                In mirrors of ice and night,

                Hath blanched with fear all beasts and birds,

                As death and a shock of evil words

                Blast a man's hair with white.

                And the cry of the palms and the purple moons,

                Or the cry of the frost and foam,

                Swept ever around an inmost place,

                And the din of distant race on race

                Cried and replied round Rome.

                And there was death on the Emperor

                And night upon the Pope:

                And Alfred, hiding in deep grass,

                Hardened his heart with hope.

                A sea-folk blinder than the sea

                Broke all about his land,

                But Alfred up against them bare

                And gripped the ground and grasped the air,

                Staggered, and strove to stand.

                He bent them back with spear and spade,

                With desperate dyke and wall,

                With foemen leaning on his shield