The Christ Child lay on Mary's lap.
His hair was like a crown.
And all the flowers looked up to Him,
And all the stars looked down.

whereas many years before Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her poem "The Doves" had written of a palm tree:

The tropic flowers looked up to it,
The tropic stars looked down.

Walt Whitman and Gilbert K. Chesterton seem a strange combination. But Chesterton himself has acknowledged that he found in "Leaves of Grass" a great and wholesome inspiration. This seems strange to us, for the American Whitmanite or Whitmaniac is a pale long-haired creature of many 'isms, directly the opposite of a robust Christian like Chesterton. But in the eighteen-nineties when "science announced nonentity and art admired decay" Walt Whitman's "barbaric yawp sounding over the roofs of the world" seemed a healthy sound. So in his dedication to "The Man Who Was Thursday," Chesterton writes:

Not all unhelped we held the fort, our tiny flags unfurled;
Some giants laboured in that crowd to lift it from the world.
I find again the book we found, I feel the hour that flings
Far out of fish-shaped Paumanok some cry of cleaner things;
And the Green Carnation withered, as in forest fires that pass,
Roared in the wind of all the world ten million leaves of grass;
Or sane and sweet and sudden as a bird sings in the rain—
Truth out of Tusitala, spoke and pleasure out of pain.
Yea, cool and clear and sudden as a bird sings in the grey,
Dunedin to Samoa spoke, and darkness unto day.
But we were young; we lived to see God break the bitter charms,
God and the good Republic come riding back in arms:
We have seen the city of Mansoul, even as it rocked, relieved—
Blessed are they who did not see, but being blind, believed.

For some reason, it is difficult to think of Chesterton in love. We can readily think of him fighting or praying, but to think of him making love requires an effort of the imagination. Yet he is happily married, and while his love poems are few, they are noble in thought and beautiful in expression. One of the most personal and characteristic of them is that to which he gives the name "Confessional."

CONFESSIONAL

Now that I kneel at the throne, O Queen,
Pity and pardon me.
Much have I striven to sing the same,
Brother of beast and tree;
Yet when the stars catch me alone
Never a linnet sings—
And the blood of a man is a bitter voice
And cries for foolish things.
Not for me be the vaunt of woe;
Was not I from a boy
Vowed with the helmet and spear and spur
To the blood-red banner of joy?
A man may sing his psalms to a stone,
Pour his blood for a weed,
But the tears of a man are a sudden thing,
And come not of his creed.
Nay, but the earth is kind to me,
Though I cried for a star,
Leaves and grasses, feather and flower,
Cover the foolish scar,
Prophets and saints and seraphim
Lighten the load with song,
And the heart of a man is a heavy load
For a man to bear along.

Many poets are writing of war these days. But they write of war too self-consciously, they are too sophisticated, too grown-up. They are so busy getting lessons from the war, describing its moral and social significance, that they have nothing to say about the actual facts of battle. But Chesterton's war poems are splendid primitive things, full of the thunder of crashing arms, of courage and of faith. I think that his "Lepanto" is without an equal among the war poems of the century. It begins as follows:

LEPANTO