G.K. Chesterton’s ‘Gold Leaves’

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Lo! I am come to autumn, When all the leaves are gold; Grey hairs and golden leaves cry out The year and I are old.

In youth I sought the prince of men, Captain in cosmic wars, Our Titan, even the weeds would show Defiant, to the stars.

But now a great thing in the street Seems any human nod, Where shift in strange democracy The million masks of God.

In youth I sought the golden flower Hidden in wood or wold, But I am come to autumn, When all the leaves are gold.

In fiction and nonfiction works alike, G.K. Chesterton demonstrates a remarkable ability to present his readers with a new perspective, and to affably nudge them out of their comfortable ways of thinking into a jarring new outlook. It’s a beneficial sort of jarring, one that leaves the reader not only dazzled by Chesterton’s insight and wit but also, more importantly, inspired to examine from multiple angles those viewpoints that had been taken for granted.

This capability is easily recognized in Chesterton’s longer works such as “Orthodoxy” and “The Man Who Was Thursday,” but he accomplishes the same purpose in a mere 16 lines. Published in 1900 as part of a collection of poems, “Gold Leaves” celebrates happily disappointed expectations.

The speaker in the poem searches for what he thought was a rare and elusive gold concentrated in a singular blossom only to find himself surrounded by gold leaves. This unexpected discovery that he is surrounded by an abundance of what he seeks is a metaphor for his encounter with grace.

The poem is an apt depiction of how sometimes we obtain what we long for not by venturing forth to seek it abroad, but by shifting our gaze and finding it already present where we are. The autumn Chesterton describes in the poem is a season both in nature and in life. As he arrives at his conversion later in life, so too does the poet invite us to shift our own perspective later in the poem by challenging our expectations for his use of the autumn metaphor.

Expectations Disappointed

The start of the poem, comparing autumn to a later season of life, is a metaphor that poets have long employed. It would come as no surprise to anyone if Chesterton were to continue in the vein of using a declining season as an image of old age, perhaps lamenting the physical decline in the individual as well as the signs of mortality in nature.

However, the speaker looks back on his youth, not wistfully but with a gratitude for the change in his perspective that came later in life. He confesses that, in youth, he loved the world and its pleasures, and the vocabulary he uses for the prince of the world is stately and impressive: captain in cosmic wars, Titan, defiant to the stars.

Understandably, he wasn’t expecting to see his king in scattered, mundane things such as the human nods he encounters in the street. Like those in the Bible who expected a great military ruler instead of a humble carpenter for a Messiah, so too, the speaker expects to encounter his Creator in a singular majestic being rather than in the faces of all the unassuming souls he meets in day-to-day life.

With this newfound realization enters the image of the golden flower that the speaker was seeking. Thinking to find a spectacular and divine beauty concentrated in a single, elusive source, he instead finds himself surrounded by God’s presence in every created thing. Chasing the rare golden flower, he looks up and discovers the overwhelming abundance of the brilliant gold foliage of autumn greeting him everywhere he turns.

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Hopes Exceeded

By the time the line “I am come to autumn” makes its way down from the first to the final stanza, it has assumed a new meaning. Autumn no longer represents a season of decline or even maturity. Instead, autumn contains the overflowing life the speaker found after his conversion.

As he grows in wisdom and adjusts his outlook on the world, the speaker observes the “million masks of God” shifting in continual movement around him. Suddenly, grace is at work everywhere, even when it had previously seemed so scarce it was almost nowhere to be found.

As a convert himself, Chesterton expresses well the amazement of seeing what now seems a most conspicuous divine presence in the world, which was imperceptible to him before. He is taken aback, startled by the multitude of beautiful things around him in a world that is colored anew.

In the political connotations of the shift from a ruling Titan to a democracy, we understand the newfound freedom and expansive mood of the speaker as he abandons the shackles of slavery in the chase after worldly pleasures in exchange for the boundless freedom of grace. Within this grace is a beauty, not hidden or available only to a select few, but observable wherever we turn our gaze.

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