Explore "The Wild Knight and other Poems: Alone" by G.K. Chesterton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Blessings there are of cradle and of clan, / Blessings that fall of priests' and princes' hands; / But never blessing full of lives and lands, / Broad as the blessing of a lonely man.
Though that old king fell from his primal throne, / And ate among the cattle, yet this pride / Had found him in the deepest grass, and cried / An 'Ecce Homo' with the trumpets blown.
And no mad tyrant, with almighty ban, / Who in strong madness dreams himself divine, / But hears through fumes of flattery and of wine / The thunder of this blessing name him man.
Let all earth rot past saints' and seraphs' plea, / Yet shall a Voice cry through its last lost war, / 'This is the world, this red wreck of a star, / That a man blessed beneath an alder-tree. '