The Ballad of the White Horse is also considered a Roman Catholic allegory. Chesterton incorporates a significant amount of philosophy into the basic structure of the story. The poem consists of 2,684 lines of English verse. They are divided into stanzas, typically consisting of 4 to 6 lines each. The poem is based on the ballad stanza form, although the poem often departs significantly from it. Types of metrical feet are used more or less freely, although there is often basic repetition in a line. The rhyme scheme varies, often being ABCB or ABCCCB. Prefatory Note Chesterton begins his work with a note (in prose) declaring
Of Modern Poetry is ongoing. These non-sentences also stress that the mind must act, not passively wait for inspiration or intuition. And the mind must seek to find "what will suffice." What that says of modern poetry will be addressed metaphorically in the poem, the organizing metaphor being that of a new stage on which the modern poet will perform. The lines of the poem, non-traditional "free verse," do not rhyme and are not metrical. They range from ten syllables to fourteen. One striking thing about the sounds of the poem is that three of the lines have weak endings; that is, the