The Wild Knight and Other Poems. Gilbert Keith Chesterton

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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.

      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 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.

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

        Whereat the sun in heaven shuddereth.

      There is one blasphemy: for death to pray,

        For God alone knoweth the praise of death.

      There is one creed: 'neath no world-terror's wing

        Apples forget to grow on apple-trees.

      There is one thing is needful – everything —

        The rest is vanity of vanities.

      The World is ours till sunset,

        Holly and fire and snow;

      And the name of our dead brother

        Who loved us long ago.

      The grown folk mighty and cunning,

        They write his name in gold;

      But we can tell a little

        Of the million tales he told.

      He taught them laws and watchwords,

        To preach and struggle and pray;

      But he taught us deep in the hayfield

        The games that the angels play.

      Had he stayed here for ever,

        Their world would be wise as ours —

      And the king be cutting capers,

        And