Today’s Poem: A Ballade of Suicide
Chesterton’s comic romp through all the reasons today is not a good day to die
G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) needs no celebration. From Orthodoxy, his classic book of Christian apologetics, to his Father Brown mystery stories, he remains in popular memory.
But today, for his May 29 birthday, it’s worth noticing that what has faded is his poetry. Except perhaps for his book-length narrative poem, The Ballad of the White Horse, his poetry is not much mentioned, and it’s certainly rarely included in anthologies these days.
Much of that poetry is comic, and nearly all of it is Chestertonian, with all the virtues and vices of his writing: filled with inversions, deliberately constructed paradoxes, and loud assertations of the triumph of commonsense over the social moods and intellectual fantasies of the day.
It can all get to be too much. “I have ceased to be interested in merely clever people — Wells, Chesterton, Shaw,” wrote the Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) of his English contemporaries. “I’m sick of Chesterton,” F. Scott Fitzgerald has Amory Blaine complain in his first novel, the 1920 This Side of Paradise.
Still, Chesterton is as Chesterton is, and all one can do is take him as himself. In Today’s Poem, “A Ballade of Suicide,” he uses the form of the ballade, a Renaissance French form revived in English poetry by the Victorians: three eight-line rhymed stanzas, with a concluding four-line stanza (the envoi, usually addressed to a prince), each stanza ending with the same refrain.
In Chesterton’s case, that refrain is “I think I will not hang myself to-day.” Using just two rhymes through the run of the poem — the -ay rhyme and the -all — he jokes his way through all the trivial and mundane reasons to go on living: an assertion of the commonsense wonder of ordinary life.
The strangeness to which Chesterton was prone was admired by the Chilean master of paradox, Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), and it appears in the peculiar envoi to “A Ballade of Suicide.” Set in the French Revolution’s spring month of Germinal, with the Dickensian word tumbrils reminding us of the setting, the poem ends with the thought that today may not be a good day to kill oneself because the prince may die: Things are happening, history goes on, so why not stay and see it through?
A Ballade of Suicide
by G.K. Chesterton
The gallows in my garden, people say, Is new and neat and adequately tall; I tie the noose on in a knowing way As one that knots his necktie for a ball; But just as all the neighbours — on the wall — Are drawing a long breath to shout “Hurray!” The strangest whim has seized me. . . . After all I think I will not hang myself to-day. To-morrow is the time I get my pay — My uncle’s sword is hanging in the hall — I see a little cloud all pink and grey — Perhaps the rector’s mother will not call — I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall That mushrooms could be cooked another way — I never read the works of Juvenal — I think I will not hang myself to-day. The world will have another washing-day; The decadents decay; the pedants pall; And H.G. Wells has found that children play, And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall, Rationalists are growing rational — And through thick woods one finds a stream astray So secret that the very sky seems small — I think I will not hang myself to-day. ENVOI Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal, The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way; Even to-day your royal head may fall, I think I will not hang myself to-day.
"today may not be a good day to kill oneself because the prince may die: Things are happening, history goes on, so why not stay and see it through?"
History is still unfolding, the final page has yet to be written, why not stay and see what is yet to be. For all the moans, dread, and threats, the best may yet to be. So has been my thoughts, I just want to see how it all unfolds.
The line about the rector's mother is my favorite.