This week's choice may be the best-loved of GK Chesterton's poems, but perhaps not many readers know that "The Rolling English Road", first published in a political weekly in 1913, was originally titled "A Song of Temperance Reform".
I think it was TS Eliot who described Chesterton's verse as "first-rate journalistic balladry" and there's no doubt that much of it, like much of his writing in general, has a mission to persuade. Not for Chesterton the then-fashionable dictum of "art for art's sake". Behind "The Rolling English Road" lies its author's powerfully-felt opposition to the threatened introduction of Prohibition into Britain: the law had already been passed in the US, and Chesterton saw it as an abuse of the ordinary man's right to ordinary pleasures. But, if moral indignation was the impulse, the resulting poem is miles away from one-sided polemic.
Form and content blend as harmoniously as – well – hops and fresh water. Heptameters, informally known as "fourteeners" because the line usually has 14 syllables, are potentially cumbersome in English, but Chesterton's lines flow effortlessly, without a stumble. They roll like the roads themselves, whose meanderings, the poet ingeniously imagines, were shaped by drunken natives aeons before the Romans introduced more logical and direct (and therefore deeply un-English) routes from A to B.
A clever narrative twist occurs in line five: "A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread ... " The shift into anecdotal mode and first-person immediately engages the reader's sympathy. This is not a hymn to drink, it signals, but middle-age looking back with a forgiving, companionable eye on the escapades of youth.
Chesterton, it almost goes without saying, takes advantage of every opportunity for alliteration. It lubricates the heptameters: it licks its lips and heightens the mood of sensuousness and oral indulgence. Perhaps a respectful nod to the Anglo-Saxon poets is also intended. Alliteration is a particularly useful device in the last line of each stanza, playfully yoking the far-flung places together (Birmingham/Beachy Head, etc) and reminding us that, like a pub comic, our narrator is, supposedly, improvising his tall story. When he drops the alliterative yoke in the last stanza ("Paradise ... Kensal Green") you know he's being serious.
The joke about setting off to a place by way of another place that's situated at the opposite end of the country (beginning from some hostelry in a town unspecified, but probably London) could have been overplayed. Chesterton could surely have gone on for several more stanzas, and it's to his temperate credit that he resists. The itinerary seems more bizarre with each stanza: my favourite, though, is the surreal idea in the second, of heading to Glastonbury, Somerset, via the Goodwin Sands, the hazardous sandbank off the coast of Deal, in Kent. I don't think the term, "getting wrecked," was one the Edwardians used, but it adds a dimension for the contemporary reader.
Of course, there's sentimentality as well as humour, piety as well as broad-mindedness. No doubt the speaker is seeing "the rolling English drunkard" through a generous lens. It's the same lens he turns on England itself, when the wild rose, England's symbol, somehow watches over the "wild thing", sleeping it off, we hope, rather than dead, in the ditch.
Finally, the poet seems at pains to emphasise that, anti-Prohibition he may be, but, in maturity, he favours rectitude over wrecktitude. Still, he keeps a trace of the fun and fantasy going with his reference to "the decent inn of death", an image that satisfyingly suggests moderate pleasures and eternal rest may not be incompatible.
Chesterton's was an extraordinary talent. He wrote copiously, and often brilliantly, at home in almost every literary genre of his period, from detective fiction to fantasy, literary criticism to hagiography. As a political thinker, he formulated, with Hilaire Belloc, a radical economic philosophy, Distributism, which might be worth a closer look today, if any politician seriously wanted to re-shape and humanise economic policy. As for Chesterton's poems, they are simply unlike anyone else's. And the best of them are completely unlike each other.
The Rolling English Road
Before the Roman came to Rye or out to Severn strode,
The rolling English drunkard made the rolling English road.
A reeling road, a rolling road, that rambles round the shire,
And after him the parson ran, the sexton and the squire;
A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread
The night we went to Birmingham by way of Beachy Head.
I knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the Squire,
And for to fight the Frenchman I did not much desire;
But I did bash their baggonets because they came arrayed
To straighten out the crooked road an English drunkard made,
Where you and I went down the lane with ale-mugs in our hands,
The night we went to Glastonbury by way of Goodwin Sands.
His sins they were forgiven him; or why do flowers run
Behind him; and the hedges all strengthening in the sun?
The wild thing went from left to right and knew not which was which,
But the wild rose was above him when they found him in the ditch.
God pardon us, nor harden us; we did not see so clear
The night we went to Bannockburn by way of Brighton Pier.
My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.
G.K. CHESTERTON