‘The Donkey’ by GK Chesterton: ‘Fools! For I also had my hour’

When fishes flew and forests walked

   And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

   Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry

   And ears like errant wings,

The devil’s walking parody

   On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

   Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

   I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;

   One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

   And palms before my feet.

GK Chesterton wrote hundreds of poems such as “The Donkey”, his reflection on the unsung hero of Palm Sunday.

He also wrote thousands of articles – including writing for the Catholic Herald – a few plays and over one hundred books, notes the Catholic G.K. Chesterton Society.

His extensive knowledge of the Bible is made abundantly clear by reading much of his literary output where he is dealing directly with a religious subject.

In his book A Golden Key Chain, Peter J. Floriani has collected over 300 Biblical verses used by Chesterton, alongside his connected writings. About Palm Sunday, Chesterton chose this Biblical passage to parse:

“And the multitudes that went before and that followed cried, saying: Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest” (Mt 21:9) – and about which Chesterton had this to say:

“There has never been a case in which the democracy was wrong when the aristocracy was not wrong too. There was a somewhat famous occasion when the democracy was very wrong indeed; when the mob cried first ‘Hoasanna!’ and then cried ‘Crucify!’ [Mt 27:22-23].

“But in that instance, again, there was not a shade of difference between the mob and the great rulers and scholars, the learned scribes and the world-travelled warriors, the sublime priest of Jehovah and the master of the eagles of Rome.

“Or, rather, there was a difference. The difference is that the princes and priests had never cried ‘Hosanna!’ at all.”

How so little changes across the aeons.

Photo: ‘Jesus’s final entry into Jerusalem’, by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1897).

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