The wilting sarcasm of this poem is a feature which puts it with a few others apart from the bulk of Chesterton's poems. Even as bellicosity and orthodoxy are two of the brightest threads which run through the whole texture of his work, so Poems of Pugnacity (as Ella Wheeler Wilcox would say) and religious verses constitute the largest part of the poetic works of G.K.C. His first book of verses--after _Greybeards at Play_--_The Wild Knight_ contained a bloodthirsty poem about the Battle of Gibeon, written with strict adhesion to the spirit of the Old Testament. It might have been penned by a survivor, glutted with blood and duly grateful to the God of his race for the solar and lunar eccentricities which made possible the extermination of the five kings of the Amorites. In 1911 came _The Ballad of the White Horse_, which is all about Alfred, according to the popular traditions embodied in the elementary history books, and, in particular, the Battle of Ethandune. How Chesterton revels in that Homeric slaughter! The words blood and bloody punctuate the largest poem of G.K.C. to the virtual obliteration in our memory of the fine imagery, the occasional tendernesses, and the blustering aggressiveness of some of the metaphors and similes. Not many men would have the nerve, let alone the skill, to write: And in the last eclipse the sea Shall stand up like a tower, Above all moons made dark and riven, Hold up its foaming head in heaven, And laugh, knowing its hour. But, at the same time, this poem contains very touching and beautiful lines. _The Ballad of the White Horse_ is an epic of the struggle between Christian and Pagan. One of the essentials of an epic is that its men should be decent men, if they cannot be heroes. The Iliad would have been impossible if it had occurred to Homer to introduce the Government contractors to the belligerent powers. All the point would have gone out of Orlando Furioso if it had been the case that the madness of Orlando was the delirium tremens of an habitual drunkard. Chesterton recognizing this truth makes the pagans of the _White Horse_ behave like gentlemen. There is a beautiful little song put into the mouth of one of them, which is in its way a perfect expression of the inadequacy of false gods. There is always a thing forgotten When all the world goes well; A thing forgotten, as long ago When the gods forgot the mistletoe, And soundless as an arrow of snow The arrow of anguish fell. The thing on the blind side of the heart, On the wrong side of the door, The green plant groweth, menacing Almighty lovers in the spring; There is always a forgotten thing, And love is not secure. The sorrow behind these lines is more moving, because more sincere, than the lines of that over-quoted verse of Swinburne's: