Chesterton has written a great many poems, all of which can claim to be poetical in the true sense, but he has only written one really important poetical work. It is a ballad that is important for two things; firstly, it is about a very English thing; secondly, the style of the writing is nothing short of delightful, a statement that is not true of all good poetry. It has been said that Chesterton might well be the Poet Laureate; at least, it is a matter for extreme joy that he is not, not because he is not worth that honour, but because anything that tended to reduce his poetical output would be a serious thing in these days when good poets are as scarce as really good novelists.
The poem that has established Chesterton for all time as a poet is the one he has called with true poetical genius 'The Ballad of the White Horse.' There have been many white horses, but there is The White Horse, and he lies alone on the side of a hill down Wiltshire way, where he has watched with a mournful gaze the centuries pass away as the horizon passes away in a liquid blue.
The White Horse stands for something that year by year we are forgetting, those quaint old English feasts that have done so much to make England merry, and have made history into a beautiful legend that bears the name of Alfred. Yet the White Horse is falling into neglect. The author of 'Tom Brown's Schooldays' lamented the fact that people flew past the White Horse in stuffy first class carriages; were he alive now he would lament still more that English men and English women can pass the White Horse without a glance up from the novel they are reading bound in a flaring yellow cover. But there is one great Englishman who will never do this, and that is Chesterton; rather he writes of the White Horse, the lonely horse that is worthy of this splendid poem.
In connection with the Vale of White Horse there are three traditions—one, that Alfred fought a great battle there; another, that he played a harp in the camp of the Danes; a third, that Alfred proved himself a very bad cook who wasted a poor woman's cake, a poor woman who would willingly have sacrificed cakes every day to have the honour of the king under her roof.
It is of these three traditions that Chesterton writes his poem. Whether they may be historically accurate does not much matter; there is no doubt that the Vale had something to do with the King of Wessex, and popular tradition has made the name of Alfred a national legend.
When Chesterton writes of the vision of the king he is no doubt writing of his own vision of the events that led up to the gathering of the chiefs. The Danes had descended on England like a cloud of locusts; it was the time that needed a National Champion, as time and again in the past the Israelites had needed one. It is one of the strange things of history that a champion has always appeared when he was most needed. The name of the Danes inspired terror; Wessex was shattered—
'For earthquake following earthquake
Uprent the Wessex tree ...'
The kings of Wessex were weary and disheartened: fire and pillage had laid the countryside bare with that horrible bareness that only lies in the wake of conqueror:
'There was not English armour left,
Nor any English thing,
When Alfred came to Athelney
To be an English [king.']