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Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 – 1936), born in Campden Hill in Kensington, London, became one of the leading literary figures of his age. A well-known poet, novelist, and journalist he was described by George Bernard Shaw as ‘a man of colossal genius’ and by Ettienne Gilson as ‘one of the deepest thinkers who ever existed’. His writing frequently engaged with themes concerning Christianity, patriotism, and the condition of England. ‘The Pilgrim Fathers’ (1897) is an unpublished manuscript poem from his early career during his time as a reporter at T. Fisher Unwin. Writing in 1922, he said that knowledge of the ‘Pilgrim Fathers’ was ‘one exception, or half-exception’ to the rule that Englishmen ‘know a great deal about past American literature, but nothing about past American history’. His early poetry thus shows he was keenly interested in the Pilgrim Fathers narrative from an early age:
In the grey morning of the world, alone
And swore with hidden face and lifted hand
An oath that none may wholly understand
Letter by letter is the speech revealed
The other figments of that primitive vow
Scattered about the world, we read them now
More than the virtue of the gentile’s rod
The Kings of the old lie swallowed in gilded hall
But my cash raiment shall be more than all
The nations go with banners of great state
Sending their mightiest men to war with fate
But mine shall spring from dropped & ruined things
My refuse nations & my convict kings”
A ship floats, hung between eternities
From kingly craft & princely power is fled
“Get forth and die” the lying Agag said -
And flow between a hopeless sea & sky
Came back the answer ‘this blood does not die’.
The poem appears to be a loose interpretation of the Mayflower myth as a historical marker that heralded an end to royal power and arbitrary government. Chesterton describes how the Pilgrim Fathers are forced to flee from ‘kingly craft & princely power’; ‘Agag’ is a reference to the Old Testament monarch of Amalek who was defeated after a decree from God. There is a poetic contrast drawn between the ‘refuse nations’ and ‘convict king’ of the Mayflower pilgrims with the ‘banners of great state’ who send their ‘men to war’. The implication is that the pomp of the old world will be replaced by the humble liberty of the new world springing ‘from dropped & ruined things’.
A short, unpublished and obscure poem, ‘The Pilgrim Fathers’ nonetheless shows the influence on the Mayflower narrative one of the leading English authors of the early twentieth-century.
Source
George Bernard Shaw ‘Books: Orthodoxy’ Time Magazine, 11 October 1943; Ettienne Gilson quoted in Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942), p.620.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, What I saw in America, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1922), p.222.