Francis Thompson was for much of his life a ragged guy haunting the public library. We know these guys. They probably have ordinary, poor people's kind of thoughts. Here's some of what Thompson was thinking about:
No Strange Land
‘The Kingdom of God is within you.’
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 benumb’d conceiving soars!—
The drift of pinions, would we hearken,
Beats at our own clay-shutter’d doors.
The angels keep their ancient places;—
Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangŕd faces,
That miss the many-splendour’d 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!
You just never know.
Plato says that the real stuff is beyond the obvious, and strangely different from it. A long discipline of questioning and self-interrogation wins a fleeting vision of the other world. The Brits have been notable in philosophy for a lunkheaded insistence on "what you see is what you get." G.E. Moore's most famous contribution to contemporary philosophy is a sustained meditation on the statement, "This is a hand." But in Hopkins and Blake and Thompson, there's a synthesis: yes, the real world is beyond or behind or underneath, but just behind, just behind, peeking out.
Posted by shea0017 at February 3, 2005 10:15 AMOr closer than our jugular vein.
Posted by: John at March 4, 2005 7:03 PM