For me, as Mr. Wordsworth says,
The duties shine like stars;
I formed my uncle's character,
Decreasing his cigars.
Or
The Shopmen, when their souls were still,
Declined to open shops—
And cooks recorded frames of mind,
In sad and subtle chops.
The drawings which accompanied these gems, it may be added, were such as the verses deserved. They exhibit a joyous inconsistency, the disproportion which is the essence of parody combined with the accuracy which is the sine qua non of satire.
About a month after Chesterton had produced his statement of his extreme senility (the actual words of the affidavit are
I am, I think I have remarked, [he had not],
Terrifically old.)
he published another little book, The Wild Knight and Other Poems, as evidence of his youth. For some years past he had occasionally written more or less topical verses which appeared in The Outlook and the defunct Speaker. Greybeards at Play was, after all, merely an elaborate sneer at the boredom of a decade; the second book was a more definite attack upon some points of its creeds and an assertion of the principles which mattered most.
There is one sin: to call a green leaf grey,
Whereat the sun in heaven shuddereth.
There is one blasphemy: for death to pray,
For God alone knoweth the praise of death.
Or again (The World's Lover)
I stood and spoke a blasphemy—
"Behold the summer leaves are green."