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 to Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water,
Not of Genesareth, but Thames!

In No Strange Land by the Catholic mystical poet and sometime London rough sleeper Francis Thompson (1859-1907), seems to me to rank among the outstanding religious verse of its kind – the hymns, prayers and chants that are its closest formal relatives.

Struck by familiar echoes in the first stanza, I searched various liturgical texts for a source. I couldn’t find a direct ancestor, though both the noun-adjective pattern (as in God Almighty, Mary Immaculate) and the devices of grammatical parallelism are individually very frequent in religious texts. Perhaps Thompson is more echoed than echoing? TS Eliot seems to have comandeered the first apostrophe, and expanded it, rather wearisomely, in certain passages of Choruses from “The Rock” (“O Light Invisible, we praise thee!? Too bright for mortal vision”).

Thompson’s quatrain sets off four flashes of light, each illuminating a core paradox of mystical understanding. The world he’s addressing (“O world”) is otherworldly, like Henry Vaughan’s “world of light” and the “world without end” (in saecula saeculorum) of certain doxologies. It represents Eternity and reveals God, but Thompson’s vision declares it local. It is “no strange land”. It can be seen, touched and known.

Antithesis is the foundational, unifying mystery on which the whole poem is built, a reconciliation of the irreconcilable, extending from the invisible light – that we can nevertheless see – to the ladder of angels “pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross” and the final vision of Christ walking on the water “Not of Gennesareth but Thames!”

“O world invisible, we view thee, / O world intangible, we touch thee, / O world unknowable, we know thee, / Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!” The triple apostrophe “O world … ” establishes the incantation, and invites us to park rational objection. And then the symmetry is shattered by the rather magnificent six-syllable Latinate word, “inapprehensible”. Grammatical ambiguity enhances its complexity: is it noun or adjective, and if the latter, does it govern “world” or “we”? Thompson plays an addictive music, and although it may be going too far to deduce a linguistic parallel with his opium habit, the aesthetics of repetition are deeply involved in this poem. Any claim that mystical experience occurs somehow beyond or outside the senses is refuted. Rhyme, rhythm and image unfold in lieu of argument.

The unusual metre should be mentioned at this point. We might decide it’s iambic tetrameter with feminine endings in stanza one and alternating feminine/masculine endings elsewhere, but that risks clamping it in prosodic chains. An accentual reading, producing two major stresses per line, feels more natural, and closer to the cadence of spoken prayer: “O world invisible / we view thee.”

The biblical compression of the second stanza (asking “does” a certain thing happen “that” something else results) adds vigour rather than dustiness. Rhetorical questions which imitate the soaring and plunging of fish and eagles headed in the wrong direction demonstrate and dismiss human foolishness by analogy. Aren’t we just as stupid in seeking “rumour of thee” among the stars? (“Thee” still refers back to the “world” but God now seems a little more closely identified with it.) Thompson might intend an argument here with contemporary astronomers, and perhaps also with their detractors. If Victorian telescopes locate, say, the Canals of Mars rather than Heaven when they scan the skies, this doesn’t amount to evidence against, or for, the mystical concept.

Further antithesis commands the movement of the “wheeling systems” and the “benumbed conceiving” that is the attempt at soaring knowledge. By contrast, the pinions softly “drift” before they beat unheard “at our own clay-shuttered doors”. In the fourth stanza, the intransigent substance is not the clay of earth and flesh, but stone. Sleeping rough on the Thames Embankment, Thompson perhaps comforted himself with the thought of exiled Jacob, pillowed on stone in Genesis 28. The image of the angel’s wing found when the stone is turned is wonderfully literal. By juxtaposing the wing, the “estrangèd faces” and the “many-splendoured thing” Thompson seems to create an interplay of coloured light.

The final transformation occurs in the depths of loss, in that oddly structured and compelling fifth stanza: “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.” The misery is contained in the most ordinary of words and phrases: “sad”, “sadder”, “cry”, “so sad”, “so sore”. So the vision in the last two lines is all the more splendid. (Notice the brilliant metaphor that transports the angels into “shining traffic”). And then Thompson does it again, only perhaps better, turning hem-clutching abjection into the most redemptive of double miracles, Christ walking on the filthy waters of the River Thames.

William Blake’s visionary transformations of London form the poem’s most important literary ancestry. In Thompson’s work more generally there’s also an occasional, probably coincidental, resemblance to Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), going beyond the shared faith to sometimes tortuous grammatical structures, vivid word-coinings, and unconventional rhythm. While Thompson’s achievements may be more modest than those of Blake or Hopkins, In No Strange Land is a poem I imagine either would have been happy to have written. A “many-splendoured” hymn, it catches more light than any of the Choruses from “The Rock”.