In honor of yesterday’s Feast of the Holy Rosary (née Our Lady of Victory), Donald McClarey of The American Catholic reposts part of Chesterton’s classic poem Lepanto and links to a book review (by Victor Davis Hansen) of a one-volume history of that October 7, 1571 battle.
Why not celebrate a feast day by reading history, and dabbling in poetry? Sounds appropriate to me.
As I noted in the comments on McClarey’s post, I first encountered Lepanto in the form of these four lines:
Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight for ever rides in vain…
which were printed as part of the foreword of a paperback edition of Don Quixote that I read at age 14. I didn’t remember who wrote them, and I didn’t know who Don John was, but they stuck in my memory and years later I was delighted to discover that Chesterton was the author, and with that discovery the rest of the poem. I am a sucker for anything written in such a steady meter, I suppose.
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