ramping, bleeding,
Wait the news from this our city?
Groaning "That's the Second Reading!"
Hissing "There is still Committee!"
If the voice of Cecil falters,
If McKenna's point has pith,
Do they tremble for their altars?
Do they, Smith?

Then in Russia, among the peasants,

Where Establishment means nothing
And they never heard of Wales,
Do they read it all in Hansard
With a crib to read it with--
"Welsh Tithes: Dr. Clifford answered."
Really, Smith?

The final verse is:

It would greatly, I must own,
Soothe me, Smith,
If you left this theme alone,
Holy Smith!
For your legal cause or civil
You fight well and get your fee;
For your God or dream or devil
You will answer, not to me.
Talk about the pews and steeples
And the Cash that goes therewith!
But the souls of Christian peoples . . .
--Chuck it, Smith!

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 la