The Lady with the Torn Hair Who Looks on Gladiators in Grapple: G. K. Chesterton’s Marian Poems

This essay is at once a description and a defense of G. K. Chesterton’s vivid poetic portraits of Mary as the Mother of the Church, the God-bearer inviting veneration by Christians of all sorts and conditions. In “The Nativity,” she is the Maiden whose Sons birth gives every child ultimate worth, and whose birth-pangs figure her earthly agony as well as her enduring mercy. In “The Arena,” she is the Lady who presides over afield of playful Christian battle—not as Nero beheld the blood sports of his Domus Aurea, but as the Virgin atop the golden dome of her own university, Notre Dame.