The Wild Knight and Other Poems

The Wild Knight and Other Poems  (1900)  by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

My thanks are due to the Editors of the Outlook and the Speaker for the kind permission they have given me to reprint a considerable number of the following poems. They have been selected and arranged rather with a view to unity of spirit than to unity of time or value; many of them being juvenile.

• By the Babe Unborn
• The World’s Lover
• The Skeleton
• A Chord of Colour
• The Happy Man
• The Unpardonable Sin
• A Novelty
• Ultimate
• The Donkey
• The Beatific Vision
• The Hope of the Streets
• Ecclesiastes
• Song of the Children
• The Fish
• Gold Leaves
• Thou Shalt Not Kill a Certain Evening
• A Man and His Image
• The Mariner
• The Triumph of Man
• Cyclopean
• Joseph
• Modern Elfland
• Eternities
• A Christmas Carol
• Alone
• King’s Cross Station
• The Human Tree
• To Them That Mourn
• The Outlaw
• Behind
• The End of Fear
• The Holy of Holies
• The Mirror of Madmen
• E. C. B.
• The Desecraters
• An Alliance
• The Ancient of Days
• The Last Masquerade
• The Earth’s Shame
• Vanity
• The Lamp Post
• The Pessimist
• A Fairy Tale
• A Portrait
• Femina Contra Mundum
• To a Certain Nation
• The Praise of Dust
• The Ballad of the Battle of Gibeon
• ‘Vulgarised'
• The Ballad of God-Makers
• At Night
• The Woodcutter
• Art Colours
• The Two Women
• The Wild Knight

Another tattered rhymster in the ring,

With but the old plea to the sneering schools,

That on him too, some secret night in spring

Came the old frenzy of a hundred fools

To make some thing: the old want dark and deep,

The thirst of men, the hunger of the stars,

Since first it tinged even the Eternal's sleep,

With monstrous dreams of trees and towns and mars.

When all He made for the first time He saw,

Scattering stars as misers shake their pelf.

Then in the last strange wrath broke His own law,

And made a graven image of Himself.