G. K. Chesterton

G. K. Chesterton

Summary

Portrait of G. K. Chesterton G. K. Chesterton Poems

King Dives he was walking in his garden in the sun,
He shook his hand at heaven, and he called the wheels to run,
And the eyes of him were hateful eyes, the lips of him were curled,
And he called upon his father that is lord below the world,
Sitting in the Gate of Treason, in the gate of broken seals,
"Bend and bind them, bend and bind them, bend and bind them into wheels,
Then once more in all my garden there may swing and sound and sweep—
The noise of all the sleepless things that sing the soul to sleep."
Call upon the wheels, master, call upon the wheels.
Source: Gutenberg

Portrait of G. K. Chesterton G. K. Chesterton Poems

Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign (But
Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Source: Gutenberg

Portrait of G. K. Chesterton G. K. Chesterton Poems

In your soul is sealed a pleasure that you have not known at all;
Pleasure subtle as your spirit, strange and slender as your frame,
Fiercer than the pain that folds you, softer than your sorrow's name.
Not as mine, my soul's anointed, not as mine the rude and light
Easy mirth of many faces, swaggering pride of song and fight;
Something stranger, something sweeter, something waiting you afar,
Secret as your stricken senses, magic as your sorrows are.
But on this, God's harp supernal, stretched but to be stricken once.
Hoary Time is a beginner, Life a bungler, Death a dunce.
Source: Gutenberg

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