The Kingdom of God

by Francis Thompson (1859 – 1907)

'In no Strange Land'

 O world invisible, we view thee,
 O world intangible, we touch thee,
 O world unknowable, we know thee,
 Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

 Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
 The eagle plunge to find the air--
 That we ask of the stars in motion
 If they have rumour of thee there?

 Not where the wheeling systems darken,
 And our benumbed conceiving soars!--
 The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
 Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

 The angels keep their ancient places;--
 Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
 'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces,
 That miss the many-splendoured thing.

 But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
 Cry;--and upon thy so sore loss
 Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
 Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

 Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
 Cry,--clinging Heaven by the hems;
 And lo, Christ walking on the water
 Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!

In 2002, Katherine A. Powers, literary columnist for the Boston Globe wrote of Thompson:

"His medical training and life on the streets gave him a gritty view of reality and a social conscience, and his governing idea that God is immanent in all things and in all experience, so vexatious to both Victorians and the Vatican alike, no longer strikes an alien or heretical note."