The ballad of the white horse

G. K. Chesterton published The Ballad of the White Horse in 1911. It runs to 2,684 lines of English verse, divided into stanzas of between four and six lines, and it is built on the ballad stanza even though it often departs from that form. The rhyme schemes vary, commonly running ABCB or ABCCCB, and the metre is used fairly freely.

The poem's subject is the idealised career of Alfred, King of the West Saxons, and in particular his recovery from the low point of the Danish invasions to the battle at Ethandun. Chesterton opens with a prose note declaring that the poem is not history; he says he has placed the battlefield in the Vale of the White Horse even though the evidence does not put it there, because the place suited the poem he wanted to write.

That honesty about the liberties taken is part of the book's character. It is a patriotic work rather than a scholarly one, written in the style of an epic recited aloud, and it has been read ever since as one of Chesterton's most ambitious pieces of verse.