The Moral Power of Poetry
It can be a hammer, a devastating snicker, an expression of ideals and greatness—or a story, an epic, never to be forgotten. No power can rouse the hearts of men as can great poetry. When blind Homer (as legend has it) sang of manhood and its gods, when Dante sang of timeless morality, when Chaucer sang the stories of ordinary men and women, when Shakespeare wrote the original “Games of Thrones,” when the great Romanticists sang of the human will, when the contemporary poets have flailed at language in despair of the human condition: All gave us words and inspiration and conviction unforgettable.
But where, today, is the poet tolling again and again the tocsin that rouses us to defend our ideals? The last, I think, was the English journalist, novelist, detective story pioneer, and—resoundingly— poet, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936). His life spanned the period that the philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand described as the degringolade of the most progressive, optimistic, brightest era of human progress in the Nineteenth Century under reason, freedom, and capitalism in America.
Chesterton lived to see the collapse of all of it into socialism: the Leninist putsch in Russia, WWI, the Great Depression, and the rise of Nazism.
His great spirit was of the Nineteenth Century. He was the foremost Catholic apologist of his time, perhaps the most popular of all time, but his love was of all the greatness of man’s spirit, of philosophy as liberation, of the creed of political liberty. To my mind, he was the last great poet of the Western march. As much as I love Rudyard Kipling, Kipling was the poet of the British Empire at its best, but also in decline. His view was political in a grand sense; he did not strive, like Chesterton, to explain what it all meant.
I could not pick a favorite among Chesterton’s poems. No one should miss his epic, “The Ballad of the White Horse,” (1911) about the heroic deeds of King Albert. It is now called one the last great epic poems written in the English language. Here’s an excerpt:
There was no English armor left,
Nor any English thing,
When Alfred came to Athelney
To be an English King
For our time, no word that Chesterton wrote is out of date or irrelevant. My intention, here, is to call for poetry’s heroic pulse. Poetry at its best, and that always is Chesterton, is his drum beat of the ideal, the onward march of the right.
The battle of Lepanto took place in 1571. The fleet of the Ottoman Empire seemed to rule the Mediterranean. And the galleys of the fleet were rowed by Christian slaves—slaves seized again and again in Ottoman incursions into Europe. Male captives were chained to oars in the galleys; women captives were consigned to the harems.
Lepanto was the largest naval battle since antiquity, with 400 war ships involved, almost all of them rowed galleys. The Holy League was outnumbered. This engagement was between a coalition of Catholic states (mostly Spain and Italy) and the fleet of the mighty Ottoman Empire. The forces met in the Gulf of Petras (the Ionian Sea west of Greece). The Ottoman forces sailed west from their home port of Lepanto and met the League sailing east from Sicily. Phillip II of Spain and Venice, at that time a mighty sea power, put up the money and ships.
The victory of the coalition was the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire’s thrust into Europe. The victory was military, but, far more, it was moral. For many decades, the Ottoman Turk had terrified Europe. The victories of Suleiman the Magnificent had stunned Christian forces in Europe. The resounding defeat of the Turk at Lepanto signified the deterioration of the hideous Turkish slave empire and heartened all of Europe.
In his epic poem, “Lepanto,” Chesterton captured the inspiration of the soaring onward drum beat of Christian forces, led by Don John of Austria, marching toward their port of debarkation in Spain. The barbaric Islamic slavers are sailing in their galleys with Christian men chained to the oars, but “Don John of Austria is marching to the sea.”
No form of human expression can equal verse in evoking the emotion and meaning of epic human events. Rare indeed is the power of Chesterton’s human, moral, and heroic depiction of the battle of Lepanto.
The poem opens with the “Soldan (sultan) of Byzantium, the leaders of the Turks, exulting in his power. He is Selim II, son of Suleiman the Magnificent; his nickname is Sulim the Sot. He sees a weak West, fighting internal battles, unable to unite against Islam. He believes the time is right to invade Italy and take Rome. All the Mediterranean is in terror of his ships. No countries have responded to Pope Pius V’s plea to Christendom to arm.
Lepanto
White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
Don John of Austria has no crown. He is the illegitimate son of Charles V. But Chesterton calls him the “last knight of Europe…” He organizes a crusade and begin marching to Spain, where a fleet will be launched against the forces of Selim II.
Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young,
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black/purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
As he marches across Europe, “Holding his head up for a flag of all the free,” Chesterton begins a refrain that ultimately becomes thrilling: “Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.”
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain—hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.
Finally, Islam is stirring. Chesterton refers to Muhammad as “Mahound,” a term used by Christian writers since Medieval times to attack the prophet as a demon or false god. Now in paradise, with his promised virgins, he is stirring uneasily at the intimation “That which was our trouble comes again out of the west.” Demons are arising to Mahound’s call. He names earlier leaders of the Great Crusades: “It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate.”
Don John’s forces have reached Spain:
“(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still—hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.”
Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.
They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,—
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, “Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate ;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.”
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still—hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.
St. Michael’s on his mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.
All Christianity is embroiled in battles with each other and with Christianity itself. But “Don John of Austria/Is shouting to the ships.” While kings of Christendom loll in luxury and hatch murderous conspiracies, “Don John of Austria has fired on the Turk.”
King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial, and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John’s hunting, and his hounds have bayed—
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.
On the day of the great naval clash, the pope is praying; he has a vision of the “crescent” of Islamic ships. “And below the ships are prisons…Christian captives sick and sunless…like a nation in the mines….And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell….And he finds his god forgotten and he no more seeks a sign.”
“But Don John of Austria has burst the battle line! …Breaking of the hatches and bursting of the holds….Domino gloria! Don John of Austria/ has set his people free.”
The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man’s house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings’ horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign—
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!
Among those who fought was Miguel de Cervantes, later author of Don Quixote, regarded as the greatest writer in the Spanish language. At Lepanto, he received three separate serious wounds, which, among other things rendered his left arm permanently useless. “But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.”
Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade….
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)
Lepanto delivered a defeat to Islamic forces that permanently broke their power in the Mediterranean. Above all, it was a moral victory for a Europe and a Christendom that lived in terror of the Turkish power.
With its power broken at sea, Islam’s land attacks on Europe continued for a century, blocked by the Polish knights, but always with new slaves taken by Islam. The final great Islamic invasion, which captured Vienna, was defeated by another Christian coalition, this one led by the Polish hero Jan Sobieski, later King Jan III Sobieski. The lifting of the siege of Vienna and Sobieski’s ruthless pursuit of the fleeing Turks ended Islam’s attempted expansion into Europe. That story is told by Henryk Sienkiewicz, in his great Romantic “trilogy.”
Source: The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton (1927)
About the Author: Walter Donway
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