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Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner

02 September 2022

Malcolm Guite revisits Chesterton’s great narrative poem about King Alfred

RETURNING, after a long break, to work on my Arthurian ballads, I thought that I would read myself back into the form by revisiting G. K. Chesterton’s great narrative poem about King Alfred, The Ballad of the White Horse. This time, I was especially struck by the dedicatory verses to his wife, Frances. In that dedication, he asks the obvious question: Why bother? Why should we try to retell these old stories, whether of legend or of history? Is it even possible, and, if it were, can it have anything to say to us now? As Chesterton puts it, rather more poetically:


Why bend above a shapeless shroud
Seeking in such archaic cloud
Sight of strong lords and light?


He rephrases the question again in the next verse, but in such a way that the question begins to answer itself:


Where seven sunken Englands

Lie buried one by one,
Why should one idle spade, I wonder,
Shake up the dust of thanes like thunder
To smoke and choke the sun?


That image of the “seven sunken Englands” overlayed on top of one another is wonderfully suggestive. Indeed, rereading it suddenly called to mind a brilliant lecture I heard Rowan Williams give, years ago, to a gathering of the David Jones Society. Discussing the great Welsh poet’s vision of the world and his poetic technique, Williams said that time, in Jones’s writing, was not figured or experienced as an arrow flying past us, or a succession of streaming moments each carrying everything away irrevocably into the past.

But, rather, Lord Williams suggested, time for Jones is like a series of layers richly accumulating over the same patch of ground, the same city or valley or hamlet. Like leaves accumulating on a forest floor, each successive year leaves a place more richly layered, more deeply patterned and textured. And all these layers of history and legend are still there, ready to be woken and evoked by the poet, ready to be made present again, and to give us a much fuller and more nuanced sense of who and where we are.

All that seemed implicit in Chesterton’s phrase, as well as Jones’s poetry, vastly different though the two poets are; for, where Jones gives us high-modernist prose-poetry, immensely learned in many languages, and bristling with footnotes, Chesterton offers a swinging, ringing, swashbuckling popular ballad, which helped many ordinary people to read and understand the times that lay ahead of them.

Although the poem was published in 1911, it accompanied and encouraged many soldiers in the First World War, and its phrases “Naught for your comfort” and “The High Tide and the Turn” were taken up in editorials in The Times during the Second World War.

Chesterton asks and answers one last vital question in his dedicatory poem:


But who shall look from Alfred’s hood
Or breathe his breath alive?
His century like a small dark cloud
Drifts far. . .

Can we ever look out from the eyes of our ancestors and know the world as they knew it? Chesterton suggests that, for all the other changes and chances, if we share the same great creed as our forebears and see the world in the light of the cross and resurrection, then we can, indeed, see as they saw. Chesterton looks at the pendant cross that his wife is wearing and puts it like this:

Lady, by one light only

We look from Alfred’s eyes,
We know he saw athwart the wreck
The sign that hangs about your neck,
Where One more than Melchizedek
Is dead and never dies.

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