The Wild Knight and Other Poems/Alone

by Gilbert Keith Chesterton

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.'