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 estrangèd
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!
Commentary by
Corinna Laughlin Francis Thompson was a remarkable figure
by any measure. Born in 1859, he was compared to Keats and Shakespeare
in his lifetime, and although his reputation declined after his death,
many of his poems, in particular his masterpiece, “The Hound of Heaven,”
have never gone out of print. Thompson was raised in a devoutly
Catholic family. His family hoped he would be a priest, and he was sent
to a minor seminary, but he was awkward and shy and was deemed
unsuitable. He was sent to study medicine, a subject for which he had no
vocation and little interest. He was too timid to tell his family that
he wanted to be a writer—all they wanted to talk about was “cricket” and
“wars,” he later said—and things began to go downhill for Thompson.
After an illness, Thompson became addicted to opium. Things got so bad
that Thompson ended up on the streets. He was homeless in London for
three years and could only be reached by general delivery to the “Post
Office, Charing Cross, London.” It was poetry that eventually
pulled him back from the brink. All this time, Thompson had continued to
write. He submitted some poems to a Catholic editor, Wilfrid Meynell,
which were published. When Meynell met the author, and realized that he
was totally destitute, he and his wife Alice helped Thompson get off the
streets and (at least for a time) overcome his addiction.
Thanks to the Meynell’s intervention and support, Thompson became a
writer—though never a prolific one. He wrote essays and reviews for
various journals, and he continued to write poetry as well, eventually
publishing three books. At the same time, he was never what you
might call “normal.” He would suddenly get up from the table and
disappear at mealtimes, and a friend wrote that “No money... could keep
him in a decent suit of clothes for long. ...He passed at once into a
picturesque nondescript garb that was all his own and made him resemble
some weird pedlar or packman.” In spite of all the darkness
Thompson had experienced in his life, and his repeated bouts with
depression, his faith was ultimately full of hope. “I do firmly
believe that none are lost who have not wilfully closed their eyes to
the known light: that such as fall with constant striving, battling with
their temperament, or through ill-training circumstance which shuts them
from true light, &c.; that all these shall taste of God's justice, which
for them is better than man's mercy.” Thompson died of
tuberculosis on November 13, 1907 at the age of 48. The poem
we’re reading today, “The Kingdom of God,” was one of Thompson’s last
poems, not published until after his death. The poem begins with a
series of paradoxical assertions – we see the invisible, we touch the
intangible, we know the unknowable, we take hold of the
“inapprehensible.” We have access to the world of the spirit. It is not
far away--we do not need to look to the stars to find God. In fact, we
need not go elsewhere to seek God any more than the fish needs to search
for the water or the eagle the air. In other words, God comes to us in
our own element—God is our element. The divine is
close—if we were listening, we could hear the wings of angels beating at
our “clay-shuttered doors.” But with our “estranged faces”—not looking
for God—we don’t see “the many-splendored thing.” Nevertheless,
God is everywhere, accessible to all who call upon him. At the end of
the poem, Thompson alludes to his own experiences on the streets of
London. In the depths of sadness, he says, “cry,” and there will be
Jacob’s ladder, linking heaven and Charing Cross. Ask for help, and
Christ will walk on the water, not far away on the Sea of Galilee, but
nearby: on the Thames. In this poem, Thompson’s very Catholic
imagination is at work. As Catholics, we firmly believe that we can
touch the invisible through the tangible—anointed with oil, we are
sealed with the Holy Spirit; bread and wine become the Body and Blood of
Christ. Thompson reminds us that the divine presence is everywhere. The
poem reflects the words of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel: “The coming of the
kingdom of God cannot be observed, and no one will announce, ‘Look, here
it is,’ or, ‘There it is.’ For behold, the kingdom of God is among you.”
The kingdom of God unfolds in our own circumstances, in our own place
and time. We just need the eyes to recognize it.
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