Mid-week Poetry: The Kingdom of God by Francis Thompson

I first discovered Francis Thompson's poetry by way of Dr. Ravi Zacharias. Thompson was considered to be a genius, but suffered from an addiction to opium. While living on the streets, he was eventually found by the Hound of Heaven, and his life was turned around.

"The Kingdom of God" is a poem that attempts to help us behold some of the ineffable glories of God. His vivid description of such heavenly realities is made all the more beautiful for the lowliness that he came from:


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 rumor 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 estrangéd faces,
That miss the many-splendored 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 to Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Genesareth, but Thames!

-Francis Thompson