The Wild Knight and Other Poems. G. K. Chesterton

sat thereon.

      Then knew I why the Fashioner

       Splashed reckless blue on sky and sea;

      And ere ‘twas good enough for her,

       He tried it on Eternity.

      Beneath the gnarled old Knowledge-tree

       Sat, like an owl, the evil sage:

      ‘The World’s a bubble,’ solemnly

       He read, and turned a second page.

      ‘A bubble, then, old crow,’ I cried,

       ‘God keep you in your weary wit!

      ‘A bubble—have you ever spied

       ‘The colours I have seen on it?’

      THE HAPPY MAN

      To teach the grey earth like a child,

       To bid the heavens repent,

      I only ask from Fate the gift

       Of one man well content.

      Him will I find: though when in vain

       I search the feast and mart,

      The fading flowers of liberty,

       The painted masks of art.

      I only find him at the last,

       On one old hill where nod

      Golgotha’s ghastly trinity—

       Three persons and one god.

      THE UNPARDONABLE SIN

      I do not cry, beloved, neither curse.

       Silence and strength, these two at least are good.

       He gave me sun and stars and ought He could,

      But not a woman’s love; for that is hers.

      He sealed her heart from sage and questioner—

       Yea, with seven seals, as he has sealed the grave.

       And if she give it to a drunken slave,

      The Day of Judgment shall not challenge her.

      Only this much: if one, deserving well,

       Touching your thin young hands and making suit,

       Feel not himself a crawling thing, a brute,

      Buried and bricked in a forgotten hell;

      Prophet and poet be he over sod,

       Prince among angels in the highest place,

       God help me, I will smite him on the face,

      Before the glory of the face of God.

      A NOVELTY

      Why should I care for the Ages

       Because they are old and grey?

      To me, like sudden laughter,

       The stars are fresh and gay;

      The world is a daring fancy,

       And finished yesterday.

      Why should I bow to the Ages

       Because they were drear and dry?

      Slow trees and ripening meadows

       For me go roaring by,

      A living charge, a struggle

       To escalade the sky.

      The eternal suns and systems,

       Solid and silent all,

      To me are stars of an instant,

       Only the fires that fall

      From God’s good rocket, rising

       On this night of carnival.

      ULTIMATE

      The vision of a haloed host

       That weep around an empty throne;

      And, aureoles dark and angels dead,

       Man with his own life stands alone.

      ‘I am,’ he says his bankrupt creed:

       ‘I am,’ and is again a clod:

      The sparrow starts, the grasses stir,

       For he has said the name of God.

      THE DONKEY

      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 BEATIFIC VISION

      Through what fierce incarnations, furled

       In fire and darkness, did I go,

      Ere I was worthy in the world

       To see a dandelion grow?

      Well, if in any woes or wars

       I bought my naked right to be,

      Grew worthy of the grass, nor gave

       The wren, my brother, shame for me.

      But what shall God not ask of him

       In the last time when all is told,

      Who saw her stand beside the hearth,

       The firelight garbing her in gold?

      THE HOPE OF THE STREETS

      The still sweet meadows shimmered: and I stood

       And cursed them, bloom of hedge and bird of tree,

      And bright and high beyond the hunch-backed wood

       The thunder and the splendour of the sea.

      Give back the Babylon where I was born,

       The lips that gape give back, the hands that grope,

      And noise and blood and suffocating scorn

       An eddy of fierce faces—and a hope

      That ‘mid those myriad heads one head find place,

       With brown hair curled like breakers of the sea,

      And two eyes set so strangely in the face

       That all things else are nothing suddenly.

      ECCLESIASTES

      There is one sin: to call a green leaf grey,

       Whereat the sun in heaven shuddereth.

      There is one blasphemy: for death to pray,