Watching the returns and for whatever reason I just happened to be thinking of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, so your Chesterton poem was right on time for me.
"Only feeling, sire," answered the Provost. "I was born, like other men, in a spot of the earth which I loved because I had played boys' games there, and fallen in love, and talked with my friends through nights that were nights of the gods. And I feel the riddle. These little gardens where we told our loves. These streets where we brought out our dead. Why should they be commonplace? Why should they be absurd? Why should it be grotesque to say that a pillar-box is poetic when for a year I could not see a red pillar-box against the yellow evening in a certain street without being wracked with something of which God keeps the secret, but which is stronger than sorrow or joy? Why should any one be able to raise a laugh by saying 'the Cause of Notting Hill'?—Notting Hill where thousands of immortal spirits blaze with alternate hope and fear."
I think ‘The Donkey’ bears out for me Robert Graves’ notion that a ‘true poem’ should send a shiver down your spine ;-)
As English poems go, I also love ‘Pied Beauty’, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. (I don’t think that there is a more beautiful and expressive language on Earth, than English):
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44399
-JT