By Frances Chesterton
FROM frozen ice lands blows the wind of the North,
The cold wind of danger, wild wind of wrath,
Mystery wind, sing loud, sing deep,
Sing to a Babe that is lying asleep,
Sing loud, sing deep;
Blow wind, blow through the stable door,
Scatter the dead leaves over the floor.
Mary, fold closer the covering hay;
Wind of the North that comes this way,
Is quick to harden, quick to slay;
Pray, Mary pray.
From the high mountain blows the wind of the East,
The dry wind of menace, anger released;
Magical wind, sing low, sing high,
Sing to an ass that standing by,
Sing low, sing high.
Blow wind, blow through the narrow chink,
Ox, ass and sheep may tremble and shrink.
Mary, wait for the sign of day;
Wind of the East that comes this way,
Ready for battle, ready to flay;
Pray, Mary pray.
From golden deserts blows the wind of the south,
Wind of the spices, a kiss on the mouth;
Whispering wind, sing up, sing down,
Sing to a Maid, that shall wear a crown,
Sing up, sing down.
Blow wind, blow through the broken rafter,
Fill the pitiful stable with laughter,
Gently blow where Angels play;
Wind of the South that comes this way
Ever to wander, never to stay.
Pray, Mary pray.
From the deep forest blows the wind of the West,
Wind of the Spirit, wind of the Quest,
O changing wind, sing shine, sing rain,
Sing to the world that is born again,
Sing shine, sing rain;
Breathe, softly breather and lift the hair
Of the Child that lies in slumber there,
Wind so gracious, wind so gay,
Wind of the West that comes this way,
Lightly let His cradle sway,
Pray, Mary pray.
He holds the great winds in His helpless hand
From forest and desert, mountain and land,
The octave notes from near and far
Call to the men who follow a Star
From near, from far;
Winds, shake the bells in the high church steeple,
Summon the king, the priest and the people,
Each in his ordained array,
To holy night, to holy day;
The winds of God have come this way.
Pray, Mary pray.
—from G.K.’s Weekly
A wandering world of rivers,
A wavering world of trees,
If the world grow dim and dizzy
With all changes and degrees,
It is but Our Lady's mirror
Hung dreaming in its place,
Shining with only shadows
Till she wakes it with her face.
The standing whirlpool of the stars,
The wheel of all the world,
Is a ring on Our Lady's finger
With the suns and moons empearled
With stars for stones to please her
Who sits playing with her rings
With the great heart that a woman has
And the love of little things.
Wings of the whirlwind of the world
From here to Ispahan,
Spurning the flying forests,
Are light as Our Lady's fan:
For all things violent here and vain
Lie open and all at ease
Where God has girded heaven to guard
Her holy vanities.
~G.K. Chesterton
(ON THE EMBANKMENT IN STORMY WEATHER)
A livid sky on London
And like the iron steeds that rear
A shock of engines halted
And I knew the end was near:
And something said that far away, over the hills and far away
There came a crawling thunder and the end of all things here.
For London Bridge is broken down, broken down, broken down,
As digging lets the daylight on the sunken streets of yore,
The lightning looked on London town, the broken bridge of London town.
The ending of a broken road where men shall go no more.
I saw the kings of London town,
The kings that buy and sell,
That built it up with penny loaves
And penny lies as well:
And where the streets were paved with gold the shrivelled paper
shone for gold,
The scorching light of promises that pave the streets of hell.
For penny loaves will melt away, melt away, melt away,
Mock the men that haggled in the grain they did not grow;
With hungry faces in the gate, a hundred thousand in the gate,
A thunder-flash on London and the finding of the foe.
I heard the hundred pin-makers
Slow down their racking din,
Till in the stillness men could hear
The dropping of the pin:
And somewhere men without the wall, beneath the wood, without
the wall,
Had found the place where London ends and England can begin.
For pins and needles bend and break, bend and break, bend and break,
Faster than the breaking spears or the bending of the bow,
Of pageants pale in thunder-light, 'twixt thunder-load and thunder-light,
The Hundreds marching on the hills in the wars of long ago.
I saw great Cobbett riding,
The horseman of the shires;
And his face was red with judgement
And a light of Luddite fires:
And south to Sussex and the sea the lights leapt up for liberty,
The trumpet of the yeomanry, the hammer of the squires;
For bars of iron rust away, rust away, rust away,
Rend before the hammer and the horseman riding in,
Crying that all men at the last, and at the worst and at the last,
Have found the place where England ends and England can begin.
His horse-hoofs go before you
Far beyond your bursting tyres;
And time is bridged behind him
And our sons are with our sires.
A trailing meteor on the Downs he rides above the rotting towns,
The Horseman of Apocalypse, the Rider of the Shires.
For London Bridge is broken down, broken down, broken down;
Blow the horn of Huntington from Scotland to the sea—
. . . Only flash of thunder-light, a flying dream of thunder-light,
Had shown under the shattered sky a people that were free.
~G.K. Chesterton
ONCE UPON A TIME a boy was born in a square enclosure between four blank walls, where he grew up without knowledge of any other place; nor did he remember his mother or what had become of her. The only person he ever saw, as he grew up, was a sort of Guardian or Warder of the place, who passed a great deal of the time walking round and round the top of the walls like a sentinel. He was a rather remarkable old party, with a quaint sort of old-fashioned top hat and very big and bushy beard or whiskers. But he wore a very big and powerful pair of spectacles, which showed that he was delightfully scientific as well as nearly blind; and he always carried under his arm a big gun; which was enough to prove that he was the Law and the Executive.
The occupation of the boy, to which he was introduced very early in life, was as follows. In one of the walls there was a round hole, just large enough to allow a sort of iron rope or rod to pass out across the enclosure and vanish into an exactly identical round hole in the opposite wall. In this continuously moving cord it was the boy’s business to cut notches at very exact intervals and with very considerable exertion. Sometimes, at noon and late at night, he was allowed to desist, to sleep and eat a little food which the old gentleman brought to him; and on these occasions the old gentleman was so kind as to utter a short homily of the most human and sympathetic sort; pointing out the privileges which the youth enjoyed in so orderly and reliable an environment.
“You have complete liberty of thought,” explained the Guardian, “and you are doubtless exercising that faculty by admiring the neatness of the mechanism and wondering how less happy human beings can support a rude existence without it.”
“Well,” answered the boy, “it must be remembered that I have never yet seen any other human beings, happy or otherwise. As a matter of fact, I am rather wondering who I am.”
“We will resume this discussion in twelve hours’ time,” said the Guardian, looking at his watch, “when the conversation will turn upon what is the most hygienic meal-time.”
The youth resumed his labours; but his mind was clearly given over to a morbid brooding, for he actually stopped in the middle of his pleasing industry to say:
“What is all this for?”
“Enjoying as you do complete liberty of speech,” replied the old gentleman on the wall, “you will probably wish to discuss whether your hour of sleep should be fifteen minutes later.”
“I mean,” cried the boy, with a gesture as of despair, “where does all this stuff go to?”
“The complete liberty of public discussion of which you justly boast,” remarked the Guardian, “will be resumed in three weeks time.”
So the boy took up his chopper again and began to chop bits out of the iron rope until he was weary; when he suddenly hurled his chopper over the wall and flung out his arms with a wild gesture to the sky.
“Who made all this?” he cried, “Who built this place, and why?”
“Silence!” cried the Guardian from the wall, in a voice of thunder, “You enjoy complete liberty of thought and speech; and I will not allow you to be fettered by Creed or Dogma.”
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Source: Daylight and Nightmare: Uncollected Stories and Fables by G.K. Chesterton.
From Chesterton, Belloc, Baring (1936)
By Raymond Las Vergnas
IF MARRIAGE is merely a contract, then the union between two spouses falls back into being a capricious, because commercial, alliance. The moment incompatibility becomes evident, divorce flings wide the prison-gates. The Family is disintegrated; the children are distributed according to the legality of the claims. Such is the disastrous effect of the Contract-theory. On the other hand, let divorce be forbidden, let the heroic nobility of the Oath be rediscovered, and Marriage will become again what it should never have ceased to be—an act of Faith and a Sacrament.
In that happy country which Chesterton, by studying the past, could project into the future, in that blessed Family where parents and children are as one, a high place is reserved for the Woman. But in no ‘feminist’ sense. Few writers more than Chesterton have scoffed at the attempts of the modern woman to be no more a woman. The ‘suffragette’ tends to be but a hybrid, halfway between wife and husband, and inspired him with none but the most vivacious jests. Not that he was at all blind to the heavy burden bound by a pro-masculine society on the weaker sex, which was, indeed too often sacrificed. But his argument moves us precisely because of its paradoxical justness. Woman is wrong, he considers, to try to adapt herself to society by making a man of herself. The contrary should come about—Society should adapt itself to womanhood by becoming gentler. To Feminists, he acknowledges that women undergo a revolting tyranny in factories; but he wanted to destroy the factories, while they, he felt, were content with destroying womanhood.
The return of Woman to her original condition—tending her home and bringing up her children, was not imposed upon Chesterton by any vague contempt for the intellectual or practical potentialities of a wife. Domestic life, in the noblest sense of the word, seemed to him the best possible adornment for the mind and the perfection of the heart’s virtues. What praise for the very nature of woman is the comparison between her and the Church of God—that ‘everlasting Handmaid’! A wife is, too, a modest working-woman, and there exists no vocation ‘more generous, more perilous, and more romantic.’ This romance of humility, this adventurousness of the humdrum, are characteristic of the way in which the essayist thinks of the Family. When he prays that Society shall allow the wife to be not only the soul but the very body of the Home, he is, in reality, rendering the highest homage to the Mistress of the House—a desire, not for superiority, nor even equality, but simply for being there. He recognises the helplessness of the husband, the moment he is reduced to being alone. He declares that he is at all points dependent on his ‘help-meet.’ He owns that what is best in man is the reflection of his ante-natal life in his mother’s womb: and this notorious anti-feminist could write these subtle lines to the glory of Woman:
“Every man is womanized, merely by being born. They talk of the masculine woman; but every man is a feminized man.” (Orthodoxy)
The virtues of the Family and Home, due to free choice and limitation, form
the basic cell of the social organism. Banish the spirit of Home, and you suppress the very possibility of a sanely constituted society.
+ + +
Source: Excerpt from Chesterton, Belloc, Baring by Raymond Las Vergnas. Sheed & Ward, New York; 1936. The three studies contained in this book originally appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The studies were slightly amplified and translated by C.C. Martindale, S.J., for publication in a single volume.
O learned man who never learned to learn,
Save to deduce, by timid steps and small,
From towering smoke that fire can never burn
And from tall tales that men were never tall.
Say, have you thought what manner of man it is
Of whom men say 'He could strike giants down'?
Or what strong memories over time's abyss
Bore up the pomp of Camelot and the crown.
And why one banner all the background fills,
Beyond the pageants of so many spears,
And by what witchery in the western hills
A throne stands empty for a thousand years.
Who hold, unheeding this immense impact,
Immortal story for a mortal sin;
Lest human fable touch historic fact,
Chase myths like moths, and fight them with a pin.
Take comfort; rest—there needs not this ado.
You shall not be a myth, I promise you.
~G.K. Chesterton
Our God who made two lovers in a garden,
And smote them separate and set them free,
Their four eyes wild for wonder and wrath and pardon
And their kiss thunder as lips of land and sea:
Each rapt unendingly beyond the other,
Two starry worlds of unknown gods at war,
Wife and not mate, a man and not a brother,
We thank thee thou hast made us what we are.
Make not the grey slime of infinity
To swamp these flowers thou madest one by one;
Let not the night that was thine enemy
Mix a mad twilight of the moon and sun;
Waken again to thunderclap and clamour
The wonder of our sundering and the song,
Or break our hearts with thine hell-shattering hammer
But leave a shade between us all day long.
Shade of high shame and honourable blindness
When youth, in storm of dizzy and distant things,
Finds the wild windfall of a little kindness
And shakes to think that all the world has wings.
When the one head that turns the heavens in turning
Moves yet as lightly as a lingering bird,
And red and random, blown astray but burning,
Like a lost spark goes by the glorious word.
Make not this sex, this other side of things,
A thing less distant than the world's desire;
What colour to the end of evening clings
And what far cry of frontiers and what fire
Fallen too far beyond the sun for seeking,
Let it divide us though our kingdom come;
With a far signal in our secret speaking
To hang the proud horizon in our home.
Once we were one, a shapeless cloud that lingers
Loading the seas and shutting out the skies,
One with the woods, a monster of myriad fingers,
You laid on me no finger of surprise.
One with the stars, a god with myriad eyes,
I saw you nowhere and was blind for scorn:
One till the world was riven and the rise
Of the white days when you and I were born.
Darkens the world: the world-old fetters rattle;
And these that have no hope behind the sun
May feed like bondmen and may breed like cattle,
One in the darkness as the dead are one;
Us if the rended grave give up its glory
Trumpets shall summon asunder and face to face:
We will be strangers in so strange a story
And wonder, meeting in so wild a place.
Ah, not in vain or utterly for loss
Come even the black flag and the battle-hordes,
If these grey devils flee the sign of the cross
Even in the symbol of the crossing swords.
Nor shall death doubt Who made our souls alive
Swords meeting and not stakes set side by side,
Bade us in the sunburst and the thunder thrive
Earthquake and Dawn; the bridegroom and the bride.
Death and not dreams or doubt of things undying,
Of whose the holy hearth or whose the sword;
Though sacred spirits dissever in strong crying
Into Thy hands, but Thy two hands, O Lord,
Though not in Earth as once in Eden standing,
So plain again we see Thee what thou art,
As in this blaze, the blasting and the branding
Of this wild wedding where we meet and part.
~G.K. Chesterton
