Explore "The Wild Knight and other Poems: the Praise of Dust" by G.K. Chesterton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
'What of vile dust? ' the preacher said. / Methought the whole world woke, / The dead stone lived beneath my foot, / And my whole body spoke.
'You, that play tyrant to the dust, / And stamp its wrinkled face, / This patient star that flings you not / Far into homeless space.
'Come down out of your dusty shrine / The living dust to see, / The flowers that at your sermon's end / Stand blazing silently.
'Rich white and blood-red blossom; stones, / Lichens like fire encrust; / A gleam of blue, a glare of gold, / The vision of the dust.
'Pass them all by: till, as you come / Where, at a city's edge, / Under a tree -- I know it well -- / Under a lattice ledge,
'The sunshine falls on one brown head. / You, too, O cold of clay, / Eater of stones, may haply hear / The trumpets of that day
'When God to all his paladins / By his own splendour swore / To make a fairer face than heaven, / Of dust and nothing more. '