The Ballad of St. Barbara, and Other Verses

AND OTHER VERSES
GILBERT KEITH CHESTERTON
LONDON
CECIL PALMER
OAKLEY HOUSE BLOOMSBURY STREET W.C.1.
FIRST EDITION 1922 COPYRIGHT
Do you remember one immortal Lost moment out of time and space, What time we thought, who passed the portal Of that divine disastrous place Where Life was slain and Truth was slandered On that one holier hill than Rome, How far abroad our bodies wandered That evening when our souls came home?
The mystic city many-gated, With monstrous columns, was your own: Herodian stones fell down and waited Two thousand years to be your throne. In the grey rocks the burning blossom Glowed terrible as the sacred blood: It was no stranger to your bosom Than bluebells of an English wood.
Do you remember a road that follows The way of unforgotten feet, Where from the waste of rocks and hollows Climb up the crawling crooked street The stages of one towering drama Always ahead and out of sight ... Do you remember Aceldama And the jackal barking in the night?
Life is not void or stuff for scorners: We have laughed loud and kept our love, We have heard singers in tavern corners And not forgotten the birds above: We have known smiters and sons of thunder And not unworthily walked with them, We have grown wiser and lost not wonder; And we have seen Jerusalem.
(St. Barbara is the patron saint of artillery and of those in danger of sudden death.)
When the long grey lines came flooding upon Paris in the plain, We stood and drank of the last free air we never could taste again: They had led us back from the lost battle, to halt we knew not where And stilled us; and our gaping guns were dumb with our despair. The grey tribes flowed for ever from the infinite lifeless lands And a Norman to a Breton spoke, his chin upon his hands.