Upsoaring wings: On the place of tombs

We’ve got another all-round player for today’s National Poetry Month entry. Gilbert Keith Chesterton trained at the Slade School to be an illustrator, but found his real gift in words—as a journalist, novelist, playwright, essayist and poet. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1923, age 48, and was renowned for his theological writings. (C.S. Lewis attributed his own conversion to Christianity to Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.)

Most people know him best for his Father Brown series of detective stories (published between 1910 and 1935)—which bear no resemblance whatsoever to the appallingly bad BBC television series currently blotting the PBS landscape. (Seriously—plots, dialogue, acting—every aspect of this thing is utterly cringeworthy. It’s a testament to the sad fact that people will do anything for a regular paycheck.)

I first ran into Chesterton, though, in high school, when I was doing a paper on the Anglo-Irish hostility. Unusually, for an Englishman, he had great sympathy for the Irish, and he deplored British policy towards them. Somewhere I found this excerpt from his “The White Horse”:

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,

For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

He lived long enough—to 1936—to see and deplore the rise of fascism, as well.

In 1922 he published a collection of poetry that included “For a War Memorial”. The 20s was perhaps the a acme of post-WWI activities with respect to honoring the war dead. (It was also the time when the British government did its best to cram the survivors back into the poverty and servitude they’d emerged from in 1914 to defend imperial policies. But that’s another discussion.) Memorials listing the names of the fallen were built in just about every school and every town and village in Britain, which are still there today. Of course, they didn’t realize they’d have to add more names from the 1939-1945 war to the plaques.

Chesterton suggests here a more truthful, if less palatable, inscription for such constructions.

“For a War Memorial”

(SUGGESTED INSCRIPTION PROBABLY NOT SUGGESTED BY THE COMMITTEE)

The hucksters haggle in the mart

The cars and carts go by;

Senates and schools go droning on;

For dead things cannot die.

A storm stooped on the place of tombs

With bolts to blast and rive;

But these be names of many men

The lightning found alive.

If usurers rule and rights decay

And visions view once more

Great Carthage like a golden shell

Gape hollow on the shore,

Still to the last of crumbling time

Upon this stone be read

How many men of England died

To prove they were not dead.